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RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS : 

OR, 

THE SCIENCE AND ART 

OP 

MAN'S DELIVERANCE 

FROM 

IGNORANCE-ENGENDERED MYSTICISM, 

AND ITS RESULTING 

THEO-MORAL QUACKERY 

AND 

GOVERNMENTAL BRIGANDAGE. 



BY CALYIN BLANCHARD. 



" Nature is all-sufficient ; man's fancied " supernatural " longing is her index to the perfec- 
tion to which development, including science and art, irrepressibly tend. All evil is conse- 
quent on ignorance, skepticism and despair, with respect to the power of the substantial, 
through spontaneity and practical organization, and combination, to complete the all-im- 
portant half of its undertaking ; to create supply, adequate to demand ; to inaugurate 
Heaven on Earth."— Religion of Science. 



NEW YORK: 
PUBLISHED BY C. BLANCHARD, 76 NASSAU STREET. 

COMMOK ERA, 1861. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1361. by 

CALVIN BLANCHARD, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for thk>. Southern District 
of New York. 



EAD THIS BOOK! 

If you are not quite sure that perfection in religious 
knowledge was achieved eighteen hundred and sixty 
years ago, READ THIS BOOK! 

If you are not entirely contented with the practical 
working of moralism, for the particulars of which, 
consult the world's daily records, READ THIS 
BOOK! 

If you happen to have ever so slight misgivings 
with respect to the reality of the freedom which " elect* 
ive franchise " secures, READ THIS BOOK ! 

If you are not irredeemably pledged to the horrid 
delusion that man is the inextricably doomed victim 
of mystery-religion, self-crucifying morality, and 
monarchy, aristocracy, or majority-tyranny, READ 
THIS BOOK! 

If you have not irrevocably pronounced it impos- 
sible th at physical science and art can eliminate mys- 
tical, indeterminate speculation from religion and 
law, as completely as they have thrust such vexatious 
charlatanry from so many lower natural departments, 
READ THIS BOOK! 

If you believe in the development-theory of crea- 
tion, and behold in Nature The All-Sufficient, 
READ THIS BOOK! 



§L INTRODUCTORY. 

No truths can be more evident than that mankind uni- 
versally have a right to all that they are constituted to 
desire, and that nature can grant it. 

To deny this is to insult justice, blaspheme the only 
Almighty that we can know anything about, and fall back 
on natural depravity, and the whole scheme of anthropo- 
morphize theology, including vicarious sacrifice, temporal 
" punishment " for " crime," and "eternal " " vengeance " 
for " sin." 

But man's claim to perfect and sufficiently lasting happi- 
ness, or complete liberty, necessarily involves certain con- 
ditions to be by him fulfilled. For if man could miracu- 
lously have whatever he wished for, he would find that he 
could wish for nothing that would not be perfectly insipid 
at first, and intolerably nauseous immediately thereafter. 
" Eternal " and unconditional happiness, to be enjoyed 
without organs, is the most absurd fancy that human folly 
ever tried to entertain ; and everlasting consciousness would 
necessarily be, at best, but perpetual ennui to all beings not 
wholly destitute of sense. 

The mutual functions of the priests of religion and officers 
of government self-evidently should be, to study human and 
lower material nature, and thence deduce a civil constitu- 
tion and body of law ; and in accordance with these, 
organize man so that he can assist development, direct pro- 
gress, so harmoniously modify, and powerfully and advan- 
tageously combine his own force and that of all else in his 
connection as to produce such a condition of things that to 
desire will be to have, with but the intervention of just 
exertion enough to give due value to possession, and pro- 
long his conscious existence, under these circumstances, till 
all the varieties of happiness presentable to the five senses 
exhaust their value by repetition. All religion that aims 
beyond this is delusion. All government that aims short of 
this is failure. 

In consequence of religion and government lacking this 
intelligible and practical aim, man, bewildered by mystery, 
has been the dupe of sacerdotal fraud, and the victim of 
political quackery and experimenting. 

As all evil is physical) spiritual prescriptions are quack- 



4 KELIGIO-FOUTICAL PHYSICS. 

ery. As all man's cravings are for material good, " imma- 
teriality " cannot satisfy them. As no sane person can 
voluntarily act except from selfish motives, " disinterested- 
ness" is a fallacy, "duty"" and " conscience " are most 
treacherous snares, and moral codes are perfect abortions. 

The religions aspirations are the premonitory symptoms 
that natnre, whose cerebrum or positive organ of highest 
thought manifests them, is pregnant with perfection. Man 
is nature's forehead, the lower animals are her backhead. 

Skepticism is the last analysis of abstraction — the most 
absurd, of all absurdities— the most inane of inanities. 

That theo-religio-fungus — Protestantism, and its resulting 
papular free discussion of religion, are not causes, but mere 
incidental accompaniments of human advancement. They 
compose the fifth wheel of the car of progress, the empty 
rattling and singular appearance of which monopolize vul- 
gar notice. 

Freedom of thought, of speech, and of the press, like 
praying and moralizing,, can do no more toward actually 
freeing or benefiting mankind, than they can toward liberat- 
ing the action of a watch, steam-engine, or spinning-jenny ? 
which don't work freely, because the parts are not fitted to 
each other, or harmoniously, and in a workmanlike manner, 
related. 

So long as religion is a mysterious puzzle, law will be a 
vexatious mockery ; order, a subterfuge for tyranny j 
government^ an arbitrary imposition ; liberty, an illusion ; 
right, a fiction ; justice, an exile ; peace, a mere armistice ; 
and happiness, non est inventus. 

Union and organization alone can give strength ; strength, 
freedom ; freedom, happiness. But union and organization 
must be for good instead of for evil. All power is capable of 
abuse in exact proportion as it is capable of use. No power 
can be absolutely destroyed, or even rendered indifferent. 

Theological vagaries and absurdities, political folly, 
quackery, and fraud, and governmental brigandage, waste 
and profligacy cannot cease, till education is reorganized on 
an objective basis, the claims of labor, skill and capital 
equitably adjusted, the affections emancipated, woman libe- 
rated and enthroned as the object of man's adoration,* 
children's rights' to the perfect development that science, 
'art, and lower nature can give them, secured, human law 
based on physics, faith strengthened past wavering, and 

* See "Religion of Science/' p. 127, and "Essence of Science," pp. bl-2. 



RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. ' 5 

transferred from miracle to development — reposed in the 
ministers of the science of sciences and art of arts, instead of 
in the priests of mystery and superstition, or instead of 
being destro.yed, or sacrificed on the altar of skepticism — 
till nature, including science and art, is looked up to as 
The All- Sufficient. 

§ 2. INCONSISTENCY AND INCOMPETENCY OF PRESENT 
RELIGION AND GOVERNMENT. 

Democracy in America is an awkward and servile imita- 
tion of the theo-governmental polity which monarchical 
Europe mainly begged from barbaric Asia, who learned it 
in schools as savage as those which ignorance now keeps in 
the most heathenish regions of Africa. " Our free institu- 
tions," apart from the little physical science and art that 
have become stealthily interwoven therein, are absurd and 
futile attempts to build the temple of liberty with the same 
kind of materials as those which compose the dungeon of 
despotism, with the mortifying exception, that they are in 
the last stage of decay. 

Daniel Webster, and other eminent American jurists, have 
correctly decided that the government of the United States, 
notwithstanding its constitutional divorcement from reli- 
gion, is, essentially, Christian ; in truth, a surreptitious or 
'• left-handed " theocracy.* 

Lord Macaulay glorifies those avowed unions of Church 
and State — monarchies and aristocracies — for being more 
efficient than democracies, in preserving a civilization which 
superabundantly piles the world's wealth into the hands of 
a few, and degrades the majority of mankind to " a multi- 
tude of people, none of whom have had more than half a 
breakfast, or expect to have more than half a dinner." f 

* See Webster's plea in the Girard will case. 

f See Macaulay's letter to Henry S. Randall, author of the u Life of Jeffer- 
son." 

The magistrate for the county of Berks, in England, has communicated to the 
" London Times " of December 10, 1860, a statement respecting the condition 
of the peasantry in nineteen towns and villages, as " a fair sample of the con- 
dition of the agricultural laboring population of England." A mere synopsis 
of the details of this statement would occupy about three pages of this work. 
They are as horrible and revolting as words can describe, or even imagination 
paint ; they come fully up, or rather down, to what Eugene Sue describes in 
4 * The Mysteries of Paris." " Our peasantry," remarks the u Times" on this 
communication, " are far icorse lodged than our beasts of burden." Besides the 
worse than beastly lodging, and starvation and nakedness to match, parents 
and adult children, and brothers and sisters men and women grown, ciowdedly 
sleep in the same room, and often in the same bed together " pell-mell" and 



6 KELIGI0-P0LITICAL PHYSICS. 

James Buchanan, whose presidency over this nation 
terminates in the year of grace one thousand eight hundred 
and sixty-one, in his last annual Message, extols Democracy 
as " the noblest system of government over devised by mor- 
tals ;" meaning, as is evident from the theological bearing 
of all he says in the connection, that the government of 
the United States is the best ever founded on subjectivity, 
moralism, or any phase of the theologic phantasm. 

In his magniloquent bunkum, the President is sustained 
by the unanimous " whoraws " of that overwhelming but 
uncritical and easily led portion of mankind which com- 
poses " the masses " (and whom it will be easier to lead 
right than wrong as soon as their leaders understand their 
own true interests), and by the opinions, as far as expressed, 
of all his predecessors ; none of whom seem to have had 
more than a glimmering idea of any other than a subjective, 
speculative, moralistic, supernaturalistic, arbitrary founda- 
tion for the government of mankind. 

But President Buchanan frankly admits and sorely 
laments that the practical operation of "the noblest system 
of government ever devised by mortals," has been to bring 
the Union, of which it is the cement, into the very throes 
of dissolution, only eighty-four years after its formation ! 

" The noblest system of government ever devised by mor- 
tals " has a currency so fluctuating that property is as inse- 
cure, and business as risky, as they can possibly be ; and 
that currency is so inflated, that it cheats the people into 
that most mischievous fallacy, that it is better to import 
than to manufacture; and plunges them into the folly of 
raising corn, cotton, and infernal tobacco, and sending them 
three or four thousand miles to market, and of distilling 
whisky at forty cents a gallon, to be poisoned in France, 
and sent back again as brandy, at from four to eight dollars 
a gallon, when they might raise the pure wine and brandy 
producing grape, and have, within five or ten miles, a ready 



some daughters have as many as four bastards. And this is Protestant, Christ* 
ian England! This is moral England! This is England, the very bulwark of 
holy matrimony ! This is England that has abolished slavery ! This is England 
that cants so edifyingly about French licentiousness ! This is the England that 
is more afraid than any nation on earth (except Puritanical Scotland, that has 
more bastards and drunkards, in proportion to its inhabitants, than has any 
other country) that if marital bondage was abolished, or even loosened, pro* 
miscuous intercourse and licentiousness would result I 

And " Britannia rules the waves," and the sun never sets on her empire , 
but may that sun speedily shine his last on all such mockeries of religion, law 
justice, government, and civilization. 



RELIGIOP0L1TICAL PHYSICS. 7 

market for the numerous products which a well-regulated 
currency would employ home industry upon, besides abol- 
ishing that suction-pipe of political thieves, the tariff. 

" Ihe noblest system of government ever devised by mor- 
tals" plunged the United States into universal bankruptcy 
only sixty-one years after its inauguration ; and from the 
very first, it has tormented the millions who, as inhabitants 
of the said States, have reposed faith in it, with a constant 
succession of " panics.' 5 

And finally, the damning truth defies contradiction, that 
throughout the vast region wherein prevails " the noblest 
system of government ever devised by mortals," all the 
labor is performed by " wages-slaves " and " chattel-slaves ;" 
the best judges cannot decide which are most miserable; 
and people of superior benevolence and understanding con- 
tend that both slaves and masters are equally entitled to 
pity.* ^ 

In view of all this, I hope that the reflecting portion of 
mankind, to whom alone I appeal, will not accuse me of 
temerity in claiming, as I do, to have discovered a substi- 
tute, by which it will be incalculably advantageous to dis- 
place not only monarchy and aristocracy as at present con- 
stituted, but even " the noblest system of government ever 
devised by mortals," in Mr. Buchanan's estimation. 

"The noblest system of government," I shall demonstrate, 
will be one that will make liberty perfect and actual, extend 
it to all, physically prepare the whole earth for it, and 
" enlarge the area of freedom " from pole to pole. 

That the government of the United States is really the 



* Those who uphold chattel-slavery are perfectly consistent with respect to 
those who oppose it in favor of wages-slavery, or who do not look to an entire 
reorganization of the social and governmental polity of the world. Would not the 
slave-trade, if provisionally regulated, instead of vainly opposed and driven into 
its self-preservative horrors, be a boon to the African, rescued from immolation 
on the altar of savage warfare, or even kidnapped from his horrible brutality ? 
Are the plantation negroes and negresses of the South, or the hod-carriers, 
under-ground steam-engine tenders, and seamstresses of the North least miser- 
able ? And was the chattel-slave revolution of Hayti, or the wages-slave 
revolution of France, the most sanguinary ? In spite of the navies of all civi- 
lized nations, the slave-trade is vigorously kept up. A great number of new 
slave vessels are annually fitted up at the New York ship yards even. These hell- 
craft, in order to escape detection and elude pursuit, have to be so built that 
about twenty per cent, of their human cargoes die of suffocation. Often, 
to avoid capture, their officers and crew run them aground in the night, 
escape to the shore in boats, and leave sometimes as many as five hundred 
chained negroes to perish with the wreck. This, together with the suffoeation 
horror abovementioned, regulating and licensing the slave-trade would have 
prevented. 



8 RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

very opposite of what it is "constitutionally" and specu- 
latively, will sufficiently appear from the following speci- 
men of the choice theological and most unconstitutional 
morsels with which the late message of that greatest of all 
sticklers for " The Constitution," President Buchanan, is 
interspersed ; " My prayer to God is, that he would preserve 
the Constitution and the Union." 

" The Union" has, constitutionally, insulted all the min- 
isters of " God," and given "God" himself to understand 
that it don't care its smallest coin for him or his "religion." 
It flatly tells him that its "^Congress shall make no law 
respecting an establishment of religion." Yet the President 
coolly asks "God" to "preserve the Constitution and the 
Union !" 

This decidedly beats the presumptuousness of the man 
who, one cold, stormy night, being pressed by sudden neces- 
sity, made a most abominable use of the portico of a house 
belonging to a gentleman wdiom, together with his whole 
family, he had most grossly and publicly insulted, hurriedly 
rang the bell, and importunately demanded a leaf of the 
family Bible ; but did not carry his impudence so far as to 
insist that his repudiated friend should apply the sacred 
paper to the vile office for which it was required. 

In further proof of what a jumble of treachery and hum- 
bug " The Constitution " is, I will call the reader's atten- 
tion to the fact that the President aforesaid has, since the 
promulgation of his said theological Message, issued a Pro- 
clamation, stuck as brim full of the very t% religion " that 
" The Constitution " is specially aimed against, as any pope's 
bull apostolical could possibly be, appointing a clay of 
"fasting, humiliation, and prayer," and abandoning "the 
Union," "Constitution," and all, to their repudiated " God," 
in these terms: "God's arm only can save us from the 
awful effects of our own crimes and follies — our own ingrati- 
tude and guilt toward our Heavenly Father." 

In the name of all that is not stark staring madness or 
slavering idiocy, I ask, has not this nation had enough of 
humiliation ? Bullies and blackguards are prominently 
among its high functionaries ; during the present and 
several preceding administrations, official thieves have run 
away with no inconsiderable amount of its funds ; swindlers, 
both " elected " and appointed, have revelled in its treasury, 
and its next President, or head distributer of spoils, has 
been chosen to that honorable office, on the strength of h's 
having been a soldier in the Black Hawk War, a commc n 



EELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 9 

laborer on a farm, a roller of logs in a saw-mill, and a rail- 
splitter; the last qualification being trumpeted as the most 
important of all; it unquestionably secured his election so 
far as the popular vote was concerned. 

And are not the people to whom the aforesaid Proclama- 
tion is addressed, in a fair way, thanks to demagogism, to 
have enough of the virtue of fasting, without being speci- 
ally exhorted thereunto ? And is not this presidential con- 
duct, both in fact, and more especially in manner, contrary 
to the very spirit of " The Constitution V 

Can't the weakest noddle outside of Bedlam perceive that 
" The Constitution " is a weathercock that readily turns 
whichever way the breath of demagogism, cant, and hum- 
bug blow r s ? ' 

Mr. Buchanan is certainly one of the most expert gamesters 
that ever shuffled those convenient cards — the people — though 
he is sorely put to his trumps, and makes some grave mistakes 
during the latter end of his game. But I candidly ask those 
who are gifted with a capacity for reflection at all uncom- 
mon, if his Proclamation does not bear fifty marks of hav- 
ing emanated from a negro Methodist camp-meeting, to one 
of having come from the head of a government, the union 
between which and the church has been dissolved? Let 
any one who has a voice attuned to bass cant, read that Pro- 
clamation, appropriately intersperse it with Methodistic 
groans, amen-ers and glory-to-God-ers, and see if I have 
overrated its sanctimoniousness. 

All remember the great Swartwout robbery, and, during 
the last four years, the following specimens of political smart- 
ness stick out so prominently as to come instantly to mind : 
the Fort Snelling job diddled the people out of $400,000-; 
Willett's Point do., $150,000 ; New Bedford Fort Site do., 
$30,000 ; Utah Flour Contract do., $160,000 ; Utah Corn 
Contract do., $270,000; Utah Mule Sale do., $240,000 ; El 
Paso Wagon Eoad do., $200,000 ; Fowler Defalcation do., 
$175,000 ; Godard Bailey's Eobbery do., $870,000. Add to 
these the millions on millions of expenses not here enume- 
rated, of the Mormon Expedition, got up on purpose to give 
army contracts, etc., etc., etc., to those who had done party 
service, for which no other subterfuge could be devised for 
rewarding, and say if "The Union" is not sufficiently 
humiliated. 

Until " Old Buck," " Old Abe," or some of their succes- 
sors in the chair of state, issue a proclamation recommend- 
ing that the word "consistency" be expurgated from the 

1* 



10 KELIGIOPOLITICAL PHYSICS. 

dictionary, or that the first clause of the first Article of the 
" Amendments to The Constitution " be stricken out, " The 
Model Republic" will justly be the laughing-stock, not only 
of the more intelligent portion of mankind, but of the 
broken-down theological dynasty of Rome itself. 

Let me not be understood to insinuate even, that Presi- 
dent Buchanan is not as consistent as were any of his prede- 
cessors, except Washington, whom an unfortunate train of 
events compelled to take the lead in founding our theo- 
democratic Utopia ; and as " conscientious " a man as has 
occupied the White House since the abominable political 
theory that " to the victors belong the spoils," has been in 
full practice. 

" Old Buck " rode into the Presidency on a hobby foaled 
of that most speculative of abstractions — " The Constitu- 
tion." " Old Abe " rode in on a rail. And the difference 
between their administrations, other things being equal, will 
be precisely the odds between fiddlededum and fiddlededee. 
And this rule will hold good with respect to the compara- 
tive merits of any two presidents that have held, or may 
hold office under theo-democratic constitutionalism. 

But let us hope and strive that the last Proclamation of 
the President, and the recent Bull of the Pope may be 
among the last vestiges of the Dark Ages. I say among 
the last, for Pius IX. may be foolish enough to let loose 
another hornless Bull, and it is hardly possible but that 
pious "Old Abe" will, in order not to be outdone in any- 
thing by " Old Buck," give our religious putridity another 
stirring up, and our bogus Constitution another besmearing 
with the rotten theology which essentially composes our 
counterfeit democracy. 

Whilst the United States is, religiously, the common 
slush-tub for excrescent supernaturalism, whilst the first 
clause of the first Article of u Amendments to the The Con- 
stitution " remains, and so long as our chief magistrates con- 
tinue to issue such Messages and Proclamations as they 
have in the main hitherto done, why not give them their 
full titles ? — to wit : President of The United States, Chief 
Priest of Unconstitutional Religion, Wholesale Dealer in 
Contraband Christianity, and Defender, Protector and Pre- 
server of Dilapidated Episcopacy and Third-hand Popery. 

It being late at night when I finished writing the last sen- 
tence, I reclined back in my chair for a recess, fell asleep, 
and dreamed that I was translated to the twenty -first cen- 
tury. Everything was astonishingly improved. As the 



KELIGI0-P0L1TICAL PHYSICS. 11 

readiest method of finding out how, I opened a dictionary 
"bearing that date, and read : 

Constitution — The embodiment of science, or system of 
physics, on which government or human law is based. 
Formerly, during the age of metaphysical absurdity, 
opinionism, speculative abstraction, and religio-political 
obfuscation, the main cord of that infernally vexatious 
entanglement in utter disregard of meaning called law; 
into the meshes of which, those most wily and dangerous 
of all knaves, politicians, wheedled man, when he was only 
P civilized, 55 and therefore excessively verdant, to confine 
himself J ostensibly, that he might not run wild, or other- 
wise abuse his boasted right to " the pursuit of happiness ; 55 
but really, that they might swindle, and plunder, and insult 
him w T ith impunity. "The Constitution 55 was, of course, 
the darling theme and favorite hobby of theo-democratic 
bandits of all parties. It was the common scape-goat of 
stupendous fraud and gigantic wrong. Imaginarily, (on 
the part of the masses,) the guaranty for free government ! 
lieally, the height of political folly. Essentially, gammon. 
The Social Organism never endured constitutionalism, and 
its cooppression, u elective franchise, 55 long at a time. It 
frantically chose even military dictatorship, in its stead. 

§ 3 GENERAL VIEW OF THE PHYSICAL FOUNDATION FOR 
PRACTICAL RELIGION AND ACTUAL FREEDOM. 

Man will be the victim of theo-religio-politieal anarchy 
and oppression, and the dupe of mystery, metaphysics, and 
their resulting Utopianism, till religion (necessarily the 
theory to which government must, openly or sub rosa, be 
the practice) is a combination of science, as fast as developed, 
for the perfection of man and all lower materiality in the 
connection, up to the point to which nature, through the 
highest human aspiration, manifests her aim ; and till, to 
this science of sciences, government corresponds as the art 
of arts ; till, through development, and the modification and 
combination of human* and other substantial power, law 
becomes, to every member of the Social Organism, what 
gravitation is to the celestial spheroids which compose the 
Solar System — a perfeeier and insurer of order and actual 
freedom. But I shall treat this vast subject ^ somewhat 
specially, and with reference to measures immediately to be 
taken, in its proper place. In the meantime, I pledge my- 
self to advance no theory which I shall not demonstrate to 



12 RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

be practical — none that is not indispensably necessary to be 
understood before the inauguration of true religion, and 
actually free government, can be successfully undertaken. 

All governmeLt that has ever existed has been mere 
short-sighted, make-shift polity ; what is most lyingly called 
democracy, or elective government, is peculiarly so ; any 
polity that should look beyond present emergency, the neces- 
sarily special-minded multitude, misled by demagogue*, 
would sneer at as " mere theory." Popular government is 
therefore a constant succession of changes without alteration 
for the better, but for the worse, at the rapid rate in which 
continual shifting impoverishes. If nature had formed all 
mankind, or even u the majority," equally capable of know- 
ing, a priori, or before trial, what national measures would 
be best, that common phrase — " the masses " — would have 
no significance 

Equality is the Procrustean opponent of every organic 
thing in nature. Equality, nature abhors exactly in pro- 
portion to the difference between the Sun and the smallest 
satellite in his free empire. Equcdity, therefore, is the 
roughest shod hobby on which the most brutal and unre- 
lenting tyrants — the most insatiate political brigands — ever 
trampled down human rights. 

To what a rotten condition equality has brought govern- 
ment, in the United States, during the short period in the 
life of a nation of only eighty-four years. Our equality- 
nursed Social Organism has, almost from the first, groaned 
panic, bankruptcy, defalcation, corruption, and repudiation 
of contracts : and now it shrieks dissolution. 

The world wants a government, the freedom and stability 
of which shall correspond to the freedom and stability that 
characterize the spheroids of which the Solar Empire is 
composed ; and I shall demonstrate that this is not only 
possible, but the only government that can be established / 
that can be government ; that can put an end to anarchy. 



§ 4. THE TEIUHE THEOLOGICAL MYSTERY HATU&ALLY 

SOLVED. 

" God is something more than a mere moral order of the world, and 
has quite another and a more living motive power in himself than is 
ascribed to him by the jejune subtility of abstract idealists. Why then 
dost thou shrink from naming the nature of God by its true name ? 
Evidently only because thou hast a general horror of things in their 
truth and reality ; because thou lookest at all things through the decep- 
tive vapors of mysticism." — Feuerbacfrs Essence of Christianity. 



RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 13 

" Man cannot even desire miracle-happiness ; the "supernatural" does 
not hear thinking of; its very wording involves as many contradictions 
as statements — as many absurdities as propositions." 

" The existence of mind, apart from its positive and negative substan- 
tial requisites, is inconceivable. An ' immaterial ' Heaven could be of 
no value to material man, or even to what he egotistically assumes to be 
his mind or 'spirit,' admitting that that function of brain and coope- 
rating materiality could exist k disembodied. 1 " — Religion of Science. 

Materiality (always bearing in mind its capacity for de- 
velopment, including science and art) is adequate to all for 
which miracle can be conceivably invoked. Human and 
lower natural forces, through the harmonious modification 
and all-powerful combinations of which they are susceptible, 
are competent to solve the liberty problem — to clear up the 
immortality-enigma— to inaugurate Heaven on Earth.* 

Matter is God the Almighty Father ■, Man is God the lest 
beloved Son — one with the Father — nature's highest organ 
of mind — her cerebrum. 

Mind is God the Holy Ghost — the Sanctifier or Sanc- 

* I must gratefully acknowledge, that to that embodiment of science — 
" The Positive Philosophy " of Auguste Comte — I am indebted for a clear 
conception of the all-sufficiency of nature. Before studying that, I. considered 
man the inextricable dupe of priestcraft, and the shuttlecock of theo-monarchi- 
cal and theo-democratical violence, oppression, and spoliation. Comte him- 
self did not know what a foundation he had laid,* as is evident from the 
incompatible religio-political superstructure that he arbitrarily and specula- 
tively raised thereon. This is but natural. The wonder would have been, had 
one intellect proved sufficient to the task of not only discovering the foundation, 
but of laying out the plan of the temple of true liberty. The emissaries of 
superstition give u The Positive Philosophy " as wide a berth as the captain 
of the most unseaworthy vessel would give a lee-shore in a storm ; but they 
dwell with peculiar delight and most infernal cowardice on Comte's u Positive 
Religion" and 4< Positive Politics ;" with respect to which that just appreciator 
ot Comte himself — Mr. G. H. Lewes — amiably remarks: "Over his (Comte's) 
subsequent efforts to found a social doctrine, and to become the founder of a 
new religion, let us draw a veil. They are unfortunate attempts which remind 
us of Bacon's scientific investigations ; and, in the minds of many, these un- 
fortunate attempts will create a prejudice against what is truly grand in his 
philosophic career. In the ' Cours de Philosophic Positive '(' Positive Phi- 
losophy') we have the grandest, because on the whole the truest, system which 
Philosophy has yet produced ; nor should any differences, which must inevi- 
tably arise on points of detail, make us forget the greatness of the achieve- 
ment and the debt we owe to the lonely thinker who wrought out this system." 
— Lewes' Biographical History of Philosophy ; (published by D. Apple ton & 
Co. " The Positive Philosophy " is published by 0. Blanchard.) 

* Comte Laid the foundation whereon to realize those magnificent conceptions of Fourier — 
the equitable adjustment of the claims of labor, skill, and capital, and passional emancipation. 
But the task was too mighty for the intellectual organs of any one man to perform with impu- 
nity. Fourier, like Comte, Bacon, Kepler, and so many other intellectual giants, strained his 
organs of thought, and committed vagaries in minor "points of detail;" and science and art 
will continue to have their martyrs till human emancipation is complete. Fourier's great work, 
"The Social Destiny o*. Man,'" is published by C. Blanenard. 



14 KELIGIOPOLITICAL PHYSICS. 

tioner — functional of the Father and the Son, and neces- 
sarily one with them. 

God the Son will be crucified to take away the sin of the 
world — he will be in antagonistic or crosswise connection 
with everything till, through that only conceivable miracle — 
development ; through all human and lower material force 
harmoniously liberated and most advantageously combined 
for good, earth shall be transformed to Heaven. Then, God 
the Son will sit glorified, at the right, instead of, as now, at 
the wrong side of God the Father, and God the Holy Ghost 
will, of course, be perfectly satisfied, and sanction or sanctify 
all. Then, that subterfuge of ignorance, that lounge of men- 
tal laziness — the great supernatural, supersensible God and 
Father of inexplicable mystery, unintelligible balderdash, 
and unsurpassable folly, will be eliminated. Then, the puz- 
zling abstraction that is now worshipped as the Almighty, and 
the wretched mockery of religion immediately consequent 
thereon, will, like the arch which the stone-mason forms in 
imagination, and the provisional wooden one which he con- 
sequently erects, be superseded by the substantial and 
efficient. 

Man's holiness-befogged or " heavenly " desires are the 
very quintessence of sensuousness ; they are nothing more, 
and nothing less, than substantial nature's drafts on develop- 
ment, which will most assuredly be paid, and in the very 
currency which alone can discharge them, when legally pre- 
sented—when presented in the only way that could make 
their payment value received. Yet man, deceived by his 
unworthy agents in the case — the bogus priesthood, or false 
clergy — mopes through the world, panic-stricken, and 
reviling nature as a bankrupt, with the keys to her ample 
treasury actually in his possession ; too discouraged to try to 
practically use them ; thinking it " too good to be true," 
that he has the intelligible means whereby to open and find 
all that he can really wish for. 

Let any one whose rationality in the matter of religion has 
not been completely subverted, compare my exposition of 
the " three in one and one in three," with any other, and 
candidly say which can be best understand. Nay, I chal- 
lenge all believers in " supernaturalism " to say, upon oath, 
if any expositions of "The Trinity," in accordance with 
their creed, are sufficient to hang a thought upon. 

The Jews, from whom Christians acknowledge that they 
received all they pretend to know about God the Father, 
deny all knowledge of this God's eternal Son. And it was 



RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 15 

only eighteen hundred years ago, according to the Christian 
record, that anything was ever spoken concerning the third 
partner in the theological firm — the Holy Ghost. 

Those who are curious with respect to the minutia of 
" supernaturalism," I refer to the " Devil's Pulpit," by 
Robert Taylor, and to that most profound work on Mytho- 
logy, " The Life of Jesus Critically Examined," by Dr. David 
Friedrich Strauss, a work which, says Theodore Parker, 
is " the most formidable assailant of the ecclesiastical the- 
ology of Christendom." 

But those for whom these pages are specially intended, 
need not be told that all the dramatis personam in the great 
farce of man's supernatural creation, burlesque fall, parsi- 
monious redemption, and wholesale damnation, are but 
mistakes, personifications, and myths. All gospel preachers, 
even, except the thickest skulled brawlers, let out this 
secret to such of their hearers as have brains to compre- 
hend. 

Of all supernatural personages, the Devil is surely the one 
in whom there is most reason to believe. Even in orthodox 
estimation, he is " the God of this world." His armies crowd 
the " broad road," whilst the followers of his opponent, only 
" here and there " dot the " narrow path." Yet the Rev. 
Henry Ward Beecher says, that " mirthfulness has exorcised 
the Devil a hundred times !" 

So ! There goes the Devil ! A summary disposition of 
his Dread Majesty ! "Well, /comprehend, /" take," I enjoy 
the fun of the thing. But, Sir, the majority of your congre- 
gation evidently do not understand that the black, cloven- 
footed, long-tailed monster who populates Hell, and on 
whose account God's Son, was crucified, is only a fit of 
hypochondriasis ! — a mere " blue devil " that Jo Miller or 
W. E. Burton could beat you, or Jesus Christ either, all to 
nothing in " casting out." 

Your jokes, sir, would be very serious ones for yourself, 
were they universally comprehended, unless you chose to turn 
right about, and preach the new gospel of science, instead 
of the worn-out, devil-spell of mystery. Come, now; do 
but this, and Til take one thousand dollars' worth of shares 
in your new meeting-house to begin with ; devote myself 
wholly to the church, and espouse the cause of all the 
clergy who follow your example, with more energy, if pos- 
sible, than I have ever opposed theo-deviltry, or religio- 
political swindling. 

Some of your puns, though good, are still much inferior 



16 RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

to those of an ordinary clown in a circus, that any gloomy 
demoniac can enjoy the benefit of for twenty-five cents ; 
and if your congregation generally understood the drift of 
them, depend upon it, they would soon cease to pay you any- 
thing like five thousand dollars a year for them. 

If" "the Devil" signifies the dumps, why may not the 
everlastingly spiteful "Holy Ghost" personify the sulks; 
" Christ ""be a myth, " God " a nullity, " divine revelation" 
the mutual bantling of ignorance and imposture, and all 
who preach it, either swindlers or blunderheads ? Why not ? 

Apropos of demonology, I will say to all those of whom 
the Devil has taken possession in consequence of gorman- 
dizing or eating late suppers — "fast;" and "pray" your 
convivial friends not to "lead you into temptation." I don't 
claim to be the sole author of this prescription ; for, with but 
slight alteration, as all who have- read the Evangelists will 
perceive, 'tis as old as that wine-bibbing metamorphosis of 
Bacchus called Christ, on whom is fathered so many queer 
parables or conundrums, and to whom is falsely attributed 
the choicest bon-mots of Zoroaster, Plato and Confucius. 

Strange that " infidels " do not perceive, that if the mul- 
titude were capable of investigating a subject as abstruse as 
religion, the atheism of all the intelligent preachers, and the 
little pains they take to disguise it, would be quite sufficient 
to convert them to mere unbelievers. 

Clergymen of talent, I implore you to abandon a system 
that you are evidently so ashamed of that you cannot but 
despise yourselves for advocating, and openly and fully 
preach the religion of science. Oh, if you would but do 
this, how soon man would have the Millennium that he now 
but faintly dreams of. And your salaries would increase 
instead of diminishing, your situations would be perfectly 
secure, provided you had the requisite qualifications to ful- 
fill them, and your influence would be supreme ; all which 
I shall demonstrate further on. 



§ 5. 0TT& THEO-POLITICAL CHAOS. 

The most advanced States throughout the world are 
openly or sub rosa, united with, and subordinated to, a 
Church, the fundamental dogma of which was promulgated 
by man when he was in his primitive savageness, and 
necessarily so inexperienced that the most correct judgment 
by him formable, could be no other than the most erroneous 
one imaginable ; when pure conjecture was the only practi- 



KELIGIO-POLITXCAL ~ PHYSICS. 17 

eability — the sole alternative to utter doubt : when the only 
possible religious theory was that monstrous assumption, at 
variance with all experience — the anthropomorphize phan- 
tasm;* according to which, that mere subjective and 
objective, positive and negative function of cerebral and 
cooperating external materiality — the will, is almighty, and 
independent of substantiality. 

The doctrines resulting from such a premise are now, of 
course, in monstrous contrast with nineteenth century 
science and art ; they are practically dead,f wwse than use- 
less, and held beneath contempt by all people of more than 
ordinary understanding. The higher clergy preach them 
for salary, as the more intelligent and scientific members of 
society, when they condescend to hear them, do so for 
patronage. u Smart preachers " are so ashamed of the 
faith they profess, that in their anxiety to make known their 
unbelief in it to their hearers whose mental comprehensions 
are general, and above the ordinary calibre, they barely dis- 
guise their infidelity from those whose critical acumen is 
naturally, appropriately, and necessarily confined to speci- 
alities — from the most unreasonably despised, insultingly 
flattered and cajoled, and abominably abused multitude, by 
whom both themselves and their decoys aforesaid are sus- 
tained. 

Metaphysical abstractions confessedly mysterious, utterly 
contradictory, absurd, and unintelligible — deductions from 
half-deciphered remains of the nursery legends of the Social 
Organism's infancy, are jumbled up with that most insinua- 
tive deception, that immaculate abortion, the theo-morality 
illusion, and presented as religion! An opaque entangle- 
ment equally transcendental, subjective, and indeterminate, 
is consequently palmed off as law ! And a treachery so 
inimitable as to appear, to the simple-minded, to have 
a direct, undeviating meaning, whilst it is susceptible of any 
tortuosity of construction that corrupted judges choose to 
give it, is, in countries where that liberty-mockery, that 
wildest of Utopianism, the caucus-and-ballot-box delusion, 
prevails, imposed as a " Constitution !" 

The full operation of this subjective, transcendental, 
theo political hodge-podge, this consummation of religio- 
governmental abuse, is to give half a breakfast to the many, 
and half a million or so to the grasping few; con- 

* See " Essence of Science." pages 5 to 7. 
f See " Positive Philosophy," page 402. 



18 ftELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

ditioned on sucli vexatious anxiety on the part of the latter, 
lest they be added to the naked, houseless, starving multi- 
tude, by falling stocks, breaking banks, defalcations, fail- 
ures, etc., etc., etc., before dinner-time, that dyspepsia, rather 
than nutrition, waits on what little appetite they have. 

At periodical crises, these "institutions" torment so 
excruciatingly that even the war-horror affords relief; and 
bankruptcy-panics occur in such quick succession as to leave 
no intervening complete respite. - 

This perfect mockery of religion, law, and government, 
its sponsors have the audacity to gravely assure mankind is 
civilization — enlightenment, even! And they blasphe- 
mously pronounce the extrication of man as man from his 
misery, or even the radically and effectually bettering of his 
sensible condition, to be u impossible !" And the confiding, 
awe-struck, wonder-confounded, and most treacherously 
betrayed multitude reverently bow to their decrees, and 
meekly accept their creations as the best hnowdble mani- 
festations of infinite wisdom, love, and power ! 

Theo-democratic quacks worse confound this confusion, 
and give piquancy to its agony, by calling on all the igno- 
rance and chicanery which it engenders, to regulate it! 
Elective franchise is the most effectual screen of govern- 
mental cupidity and villainy, — the subterfuge of freedom's 
most dangerous assassins. That medicine-chest of political 
quackery ; that insidious and most fatal decoy of the 
uncritical, short-sighted multitude — the ballot-box, is the 
great reservoir of the social quack-nostrums which worse 
and worse aggravate whatever evils they are applied to 
cure, till the dupes and victims of them gladly resign them- 
selves to the comparatively tender mercies of military dic- 
tatorship.* 

* u The only disease that afflicts either the Social Organism or individual 
man, is ignorance. Ignorance, with respect to the perfection of which nature, 
through development, including science and art, is capable. The political 
symptom of this disease is repression. Moral quacks, to hide their ignorance 
with respect to how to satisfy the human passions, gravely pronounce these 
passions natural depravities, and accordingly declare war against them. 
Repression quickly touches that point in agony which renders humanity frantic, 
in that form of government under which brute force, or majority power, man- 
aged and directed by the basest and most ignorant (except in mere trickery) of 
mankind, ruthlessly and continually trample down the most important and 
evident human rights (passional rights), except bare life ; often does not spare 
even that; and, equally with that more chronic human scourge — monarchy — 
sets aside all that can properly be called law. ' Popular Sovereignty ' is the 
bitterest mockery that mankind were ever insulted with. * Elective Fran- 
chise' is the most successful juggle, whereby political tricksters cheat a nation 
of its liberty, and swindle it of its wealth. The people are the mere cards 



BELIGTOPOLITICAL PHYSICS. 19 

And cynics attempt to smother their consciousness of 
ignorance, and to hide their misanthropy, by inculcating 
the belief that the social compact is inevitable tyranny — 
that government is a "necessary evil?" "What an infernal 
confession of faith ! 

But the most inconsistent role in this miserable drama is 
performed by those who, whilst fancying themselves fully 
emancipated from superstition, embrace, for their creed , 
that most supernatural of supernaturalisms, the morality 
phantasm; and proclaim, for their principal canon, that 
essence of the crucifixion-scheme of salvation — self-denial, 
or duty ; who depend, for all the reform that they can con- 
ceive to be practical, on that pliant convertibility to even 
theological sophistry — reason ; whose maximum of liberty, 
those indispensable aids to metaphysics and transcendental- 
ism — free thought, and free discussion are to compose ; and 
whose measure of human rights is contracted to so much 
comfort as individuals could secure, each for themselves, if 
absolutely emancipated from religion, and completely " let 
alone " by government ; in short, if there was no Social Organ- 
ism. These doubly-deceived victims of the most wily form 
of theo-religion (a form so treacherous as to exhibit prima 
facie evidence of being earthly to skeptics, and satisfactory 
evidence of being divine to believers) try to patch up mat- 
ters so as to make our social purgatory endurable, by means 
of promiscuous, undigested, practically aimless debates, and 
by hurling merely negative arguments, and carefully unsys- 
temized and therefore barren facts and truisms at mankind 
indiscriminately ; but mainly at those who compose the 
masses — the body of the Social Organism ; and who, in 
accordance with materiality's orderly economy, naturally 
loathe nothing so thoroughly as disquisitions on what is too 
general, abstract, and complicated for them to perceive its 
practical bearing. 

• Folly is rampant, corruption is at its height, anarchy is 
I as triumphant as it can be. The barbarous and even savage 
portions of mankind persistently remain as they are, as 
civilization practically manifests only that which excites 
their disgust — their contempt, even. 

j which these gamblers shuffle at their pleasure in the great game of State, All 
I the ' franchise ' that * election ' secures, is enjoyed by those who compose 
! the ' caucus,' do the * wire-pulling,' and other party meanness, and win the 
offices. The people's choice is only between this or that gang of conspira- 
tors against mankind, who shriek liberty exactly in proportion as they mean 
l oppression and spoils. The only true rcligiou mu*t be the science of sciences ; 
the only free government, the art of arts." — Essence of Science. 



20 RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

Labor, capital, and skill are so antagonistically related 
that their interests are as insecure as they can be. There is 
the least possible responsibility everywhere, from the 
responsibility of the national treasury and national credit, 
to that of the most petty shop-keeper. In short, progress 
has yet done little more practically in the way of increasing 
the gross sum of human happiness, than the numerous arti- 
sans engaged in clock and watch manufacturing have done 
toward making time keepers, up to the point where they put 
their wheels, springs, etc., etc., etc., together, fit their keys, 
and wind up. 

Is there nothing further to be expected? Is nature's 
power taxed to the utmost? Has materiality pushed 
development to its goal only to cap the climax of all imagin- 
able absurdity ? only to create man necessarily self-misled, 
self-cheated or cheating, and all but unendurably self- 
tormented ? Is all that is knowable an irremediable 
failure ? 

No. I shall demonstrate that there is an intelligible, 
practicable, and ample cure, a scientific, artistic, substantial 
remedy for all the evil laid to the charge of nature, but 
which ignorance, and its resulting nonsense-religion, quack- 
government, and morality-delusion are inflicting on our 
false priest-ridden, skeptic-befooled, morality-crazed, mon- 
archy-crushed, aristocracy -trampled, demagogue-swindled 
world. 

§ 6. BELIGIO-POLITXCAL AXIOMS. 

Religion, however true or false it may, owing to man's 
ignorance or knowledge, seem, must unavoidably be the 
general social law to which all others must be referable and 
subordinate — the theory, to which human government must 
be the practice. Religion is as necessary to, and inseparable 
from the Social Organism*, as gravitation is necessary to, 
and inseparable from, the Universe. Religion is, to social 
law, what gravitation is to all law. Mystery revelation is 
self-contradictory, self-evident absurdity. Materiality is 
all-sufficient. Or, if it is not adequate to all the real, the . 
intelligible demands of even the religions instinct, all the j 
knowable is failure, and all is the most pitiable inefficiency, j 
unless nothing is the basis of all, and supernaturalism is j 
alone true. 

The significancy of " miracle " is development ; all beyond j 
which is delusion. Perfect and " eternal " happiness really \ 
means the perfect and sufficiently lasting happiness which J 



RELTGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 21 

by science, art, and lower material aid, is producible. All 
the human and lower material forces developed, harmonized, 
modified, to their utmost capacity, and as advantageously 
as possible combined, will realize Heaven on Earth ; any 
shorter or lower aim than which can never reach nature's 
mark. 

The Church, though variously named, scandalized to the 
last degree by the most abominable abuse, and seemingly 
not only fractured, but even in the last stages of decay, is 
founded as securely as is gravitation, and indivisibly and 
irrepressibly includes all mankind. Collective man is a 
State objectively and practically, and a Church subjectively 
and theoretically ; and all opposition to this relationship can 
but augment the evils charged to it, but which are wholly 
owing to ignorance with respect to its law. The head of 
the scientilic Church will be to the State what the Sun is to 
the Solar System — a liberty insuring hierarch. 

The truth of religion admits of no extraneous evidence ; 
actual and complete human freedom, or a rapidly increasing 
tendency thereunto, alone can manifest it. A Church in- 
disputably infallible can be no other than a State through- 
out which liberty is real, universal, and perfect, or self- 
evidently and very rapidly becoming so. 

The theory that all things came of nothing is treated with 
respect by nearly all mankind. The theory that all man- 
kind came from one stock, and that all the geological 
changes which, the Earth presents have taken place within 
the period of about six thousand years, is seriously enter- 
tained by those claiming to be eminent in science and art, and 
is listened to with patience even by those who dissent from it. 

There has already been such enormous quantities of 
nothing said on the nothing theory, that I shall add no 
more nothing to it. But I hope those who believe in human 
perfection through a power they call u God," and concern- 
ing which, or whom, they confess that they know nothing, 
will candidly listen to some of the arguments, and a very 
few of the facts that I have glanced at and shall adduce 
from a world full of them, to show that physical perfection 
and human fulfillment is attainable through intelligible, 
substantial means — through the only power that there can 
be anything known, thought, or even imagined about, and 
that man can, much better than he ever has done, direct, 
and much more rapidly than he ever has done, accelerate 
the process. 

And will those who have written, or carefully read large 



22 RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

volumes going to show that the eoal -black, woolly-headed, 
flat-nosed, blubber-lipped, retreating-foreheacled, long-heeled 
Negro, the still further removed from the Caucasian race 
Hottentot, and the scarce human Esquimaux, came, through 
natural transformations, from the same stock as Washing- 
ton and Auguste Comte, Mary "Wollstonecraft and the Em- 
press Eugenia, as have also the myriads of children who 
have died aged one hour, and the man who has lived one 
hundred and sixty-nine years, give ear and brain to the 
theory, which does not draw a whit more on the amount of 
nature's modifiability, that development can be carried to 
the extent of producing a variety of races [Darwin has 
fully demonstrated that races are not immutable] of human 
beings, all of whom shall be as beautiful, as healthy, and 
every way as perfect, as angels are imagined to be ; and 
that the earth is capable of being fitted up for the perfect 
accommodation of such beings, and for their sustentation 
in life ad libitum as to individuals, and eternal as a Social 
Organism or Universal Man ? And in view of the con- 
quests over obstacles to his ends that man has already 
achieved, who that is endowed with any considerable 
degree of intellectual generalization can doubt that man 
will, with rapidly increasing speed, push perfection to its 
goal ? 

I will here remark, that the races, into which natural- 
historians divide mankind, like the simple material elements 
into which physicists resolve matter, are indispensable land- 
marks in science and art, though it should never be lost 
sight of that the former are not immutable, nor are the lat- 
ter ultimate ; they are merely the analyses beyond which 
science and art have not yet gone. 

It is in evidence that human life, in spite of all the foes 
that beset it, has increased in length even within the his- 
toric period, as has also the human stature. One hundred 
and seventy-two years have been achieved, and, in numerous 
instances, one hundred to one hundred and twenty. 
" Life," says Bichat, " is the aggregate of functions that 
resist death." Of course, then, all that strengthens the 
organs of these functions prolongs life, all that weakens 
them and counteracts the instinctive efforts of the vis medi- 
catrix naturce hastens death, and all that prevents the life 
organs from any advantage that they are capable of profit- 
ing by, transmits a weaker than necessary life-power, and a 
proportionally shorter life to posterity, and vice versa. This 
being the case, is it not downright stupidity to say that 



RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 23 

when all the foes to life are as far overcome as possible, life 
will not be lengthened to any desirable extent ? 

Care, vexation, ennui, and unsatisfied longing or passional 
starvation, cause an incalculable amount of wear and tear of 
the brain and nervous system. 

The malarious effluvia that floats in the atmosphere, that 
has, in many localities, been greatly reduced by human 
means, attended with a corresponding lengthening of life, 
and that is wholly removable, still causes, everyvihere^ an 
immense wear and tear on all the organs of life, particularly 
the liver, lungs, and, sympathetically, the heart 

The death-power that lurks in the best food or drinks now 
obtainable, except, in some rare instances^ water, wears out 
the stomach and intestines fearfully in advance. 

The ignorance that prevails with respect to ventilating 
and heating houses, temples, theatres, lecture-rooms, and 
public conveyances, actually gouges the lungs prematurely 
to pieces. 

If physiologists were not, like physicists, wholly absorbed 
in scientific specialities ', how could they not perceive that 
the ossification of the arteries that impedes the free circula- 
tion of blood in the parts — do. of the cartilages that dimin- 
ishes the capillary system of the lungs and prevents sangui- 
fication, can be retarded by diet and other means, as can 
also the shrivelling and induration of the nervous system 
which renders it unfit for innovation ? — particularly after we 
have learned more of the nature of life, which physiologists 
are so assiduously striving to do ? 

Sydenham admits that two-thirds of mankind die of 
acute diseases, two-ninths of consumption, and one-ninth 
from other chronic maladies, and from old age. How 
strange it is that it did not occur to him that none of the 
co-sharers of the morbidity that he admits all to have passed 
the ordeal of, could possibly die of anything at all deserving 
the name of old age. But few men of special science are 
capable of drawing general conclusions. 

§ 7. RELXGIO-POLITICAL THEOREMS. 

Nature — all in man's connection — all the humanly per- 
ceptible, is spontaneously changing to an organism through- 
out which complete harmony and all conceivable perfection 
will reign. For her means are adequate to her ends ; she 
has not, even through human thought, gone out of herself; 
subjectivity cannot transcend objectivity. 



24 EELIGIO-POLITTCAL PHYSICS* 

In the animal kingdom, nature lias attained to conscious- 
ness ; man is her cerebrum, the lower animals her cerebel- 
lum. All mind, thought, or will is, in the broadest or most 
general sense, the mind, thought, or will, of en lire nature — 
of all which to man exists. 

Specially considered, the mind, or soul, whether of man 
or of lower animals, is the function of cerebral organism 
positively ', and of all or any part of external and cognizable 
nature, negatively, 

§ 8. TRUE KELIGION THE SCIENCE OF SdEWCES. 

Man's highest aspiration — his religious instinct — his 
fancied supernatural yearning, is the manifestation of 
nature's self-tendency to that perfection which she is ela- 
borating. All that man hopes for from "miracle," he will 
substantially obtain through science, art, and lower mate- 
rial development. 

Instinctively, during savageism, barbarism, and civilism, 
man fancifully abstracts his subjectivity, and as fancifully 
creates it almighty ; and this anthropomorphize or " the- 
ologic " phantasm foreshadows, and really signifies the 
almightiness to which man will, objectively^ arrive. Triune 
matter, motion,* and mind, h rapidly throwing off its mysti- 
cal envelope — the triune " Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." 
Man has already eliminated supernatural divinity from, and 
manifested his own divinity in, a great portion of nature. 
He is acknowledged lord of the materiality of which all is 
composed, to the extent to which the air-balloon, the steam- 
engine, the electro-magnetic telegraph, and their accom- 
panying sciences and arts manifest ; and as soon as he tho- 
roughly understands that he is God — when God-incarnation 
stands a known reality, instead of an inexplicable, sense- 
confounding, malice-breeding, improvement-hindering u mys- 
tery," God-man will rapidly direct all the force which pro- 
duces evil, to the production of good; and (with a velocity 
increasing as do numbers successively multiplied by their 
own products) complete the process of making all existence 
in his connection as conducive to his happiness as it was 
inimical to it when human progress was at its lowest stage. 
Development and art near completion — human and lower 

* I have herein before called Man the second person in the intelligible Tri- 
nity, but lest this should be considered a self-contradiction, I will remark, that 
Man is the most important manifestation of nature's motion, and the exponent 
of her dynamics. 



RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 25 

material perfection — with a power of means increasing as 
the speed with which the celestial spheroids, if thrown into 
confusion, would gravitate to equilibrium. For the Social 
Organism is as susceptible of order and freedom as that 
planetary empire whose chief is the Sun has proved to be ; 
and the Universal Organism harmonized to the extent that 
it is self-capable of being, and thus self-enabled to bring all 
its force to bear for good, will clear up the immortality 
enigma, and solve the liberty problem. 

Without the aid of miracle, but by human and lower 
material means, all existence in the human connection will 
be one grand laboratory of good; the Earth will be so 
equally inhabitable as to form but an agreeable variety of 
climate, from the equator to the poles, leaving no nook for 
savageism, ignorance and superstition to skulk in ; and there 
will be, between'desiring and having, only the intervention 
of just exertion enough to give due value to possession ; and 
human life will be extended till all the varieties of happi- 
ness presentable to the five senses exhaust their value by 
repetition. 

After making all possible allowance for the diversity of 
temperature, which ocean and air currents cause, there 
remains an approximation of the temperature of the warmest 
days in winter to that of the coldest days in summer, and a 
difference in the mean temperature (seven degrees in the 
inland city of St. Louis) of whole years, utterly incom- 
patible with the theory that the sun, or the inclination of 
the earth's axis toward the plane of its equator, inducing 
obliquity of radiation, cause what are vulgarly called "heat" 
and " cold," to any excess that may not be reduced to per- 
fect geniality by human means, acting in concert with 
lower material ones. 

Every one knows that some earthly bodies are self-lumi- 
nous ; and it is in evidence that the planets do not borrow 
all their light from the sun. The Aurora Borealis is very 
significant of a powerful means whereby, when electrical, 
thermal and luminous action are better understood, "light" 
will be sufficiently extended to the earth's poles. The 
extraordinary lightness of some whole nights in particular 
places far removed from polar twilight (see Humboldt's 
remarks thereon) is wholly unaccountable in the present 
knowledge of the crepuscular theory, and shows conclusively 
that luminosity may be generated to an extent not yet 
dreamed of, in our atmosphere, or that the latter, being 
modifiable ev "en spontaneously, so as to reflect brightness from 

2 



26 RELIGIOPOLITICAL PHYSICS. 

the sun, to tlie extent that fine print can be read at mid- 
night even near the equator, will prove sufficiently modifiable 
for all human purposes. 

Let any one with a capacity for drawing comprehensive 
deductions, take into consideration the remarkable phe- 
nomena noted by Dr. Kane during his Arctic Explorations, 
and see if they do not immeasurably more sustain the 
theory herein set forth, than they do the wretchedly barren 
one, that the world is such an unfinished and unfinishable 
piece of botchery, that it is a mere kennel to breed mutually 
tormenting knaves and fools in, or "a fleeting show for 
man's illusion given," in which to make some mystical pre- 
parations for enjoying life in a world so utterly unintelli- 
gible that we can know nothing at all about it! A worfd 
which, the God of this present one, in order to mend his 
hand at creation, and not utterly disgrace himself in the esti- 
mation of his creatures, has prepared for them to be happy 
in, after they are dead ! 

The wide range north and south, which isothermal lines 
take in their progress east and west, and which is as yet 
only partially accounted for, is encouragingly significant. 
The curves which these lines take in passing all the highest 
polar latitudes yet reached by navigators, indicate the exist- 
ence of a warmer clime in the open sea or vast plains at 
the flattened poles. 

§ 9. EIGHT GOVERNMENT THE AET OF ARTS. 

The conditions for all desirable good can and must be 
produced. "Whatever aims to repress, instead of to satisfy, 
the natural passions, is either folly, quackery, or fraud. 
Civil law can no more be " enacted " than physical law can. 
It must be discovered. Let that figment of the imagina- 
tion—duty, and its horrid correlate— the evil-for-evil delu- 
sion, be consigned to where science and art have doomed 
so many less complicated barbarisms. Let moral govern- 
ment, arrogant government, and caucus-and-baflot-box 
government — those abortive and Utopian experiments, 
which are now self-evident failures, together with those 
bewildering barrennesses — metaphysics and skepticism, be 
buried in the same grave with their long pince defunct 
parent, supernaturalism ; and let man avail himself of 
nature's ample resources, and go scientifically and artisti- 
cally to work to make himself really good, perfectly happy, 
in short, actually free. Let man set about the inauguration 



RELTGI0-P0L1TICAL PHYSICS. 27 

of Heaven on Earth as dispassionately and determinedly, 
arid in as good and real faith as lie combines labor, capital 
and skill to construct railroads, factories, and steamships, 
and complete success will crown his efforts. 

§ 10. HOW TRUE RELIGION AHD RIGHT GOVERNMENT 
WILL COMMENCE TO BE ESTABLISHED. 

In proportion as the clergy understand the gospel of 
development, science and art, they will expand the budding 
organs* of the human understanding, and rightly direct, 
instead of mystery-confounding man's religious instinct. As 
religion thus becomes emancipated from its primitive savage 
and barbarous miracle-absurdity, and stands revealed the 
science of sciences, government must necessarily correspond 
to it, by changing from that abomination of abominations 
now submitted to as "necessary evil" to the art of arts 
whereby perfection will be realized. 

Or, if the present mockery of a clergy continue deaf to the 
demands of the age, and blind to the highest interests both 
of themselves and the rest of mankind (for I think I have 
made it apparent that until all have their rights, no one can 
have them), the hour is surely and rapidly approaching 
when they will be displaced by a true priesthood, who will, 
in temples far more splendid than any hitherto built, and as 
much better furnished as the practical and sufficient is 
preferable to the speculative and impossible — as meaning is 
superior to balderdash, give mankind real, body-and mind- 
satisfying truth, in place of bewildering, sense and-passion- 
opposing fallacy — the kernel, instead of the swine's fodder 
of husks, with which they are now fed. 

Half the money that Stephen Girard so vainly and blindly 
devoted to indiscriminately opposing religion, would be 
sufficient to found a church that would form the nucleus of 
the universal one that will divest religion of savage mystery 
and vindictiveness, and enable it to stand revealed the re- 

* The clergy always have been, and a clergy necessarily must be, the real 
governors of mankind. " Let me make the people's songs," said Napoleon I., 
u and I care not who make their laws." And it is to me perfectly astonish- 
ing that the meanest capa.-ity docs not comprehend that emperors, kings, pre- 
sidents, parliaments, Congresses, etc. etc., are but the subalterns — the very tools 
of those who make the people's cradle-hymns and Sunday-school catechisms : 
that u infidels" do not perceive where their only remedy against superstition 
lies, and that the miserable demagogues do not understand that so long as the 
clergy stick to " Christ and him crucified," as they are so anxious to have them 
do, they, the demagogues, will have to travel the same mean, contemptible, 
hard, never safe, and usually fatal road they now do. 



28 RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

splendent combination of all science ; would be sufficient 
to found and permanently establish as the foundation-stone 
of the basis of the eternal well-being of the Social Organism, 
a church, under the guidance of which, physical training 
and object- teaching, adapted to the varying human capacities* 
would displace mystery, metaphysics, moralism, in short, 
vindictive, subjective teaching ; a church in which music, 
painting, eloquence, poetry, sculpture — all that can attract, 
physically and mentally develop and socialize mankind — all 
that can charm woman, enlist her mighty influence, emanci- 
pate her, and render her, without exception, so adorable, 
that love will be universally reciprocal between her and 
commensurately developed man ; all that can amuse and 
suitably instruct without boring the masses ; all that can 
qualify for man's leaders those whom nature has formed for 
such — formed to be the Social Organism's head. A church 
in which what is capable of producing all this — all con- 
ceivable perfection — would be used instead of abused. 

More than on anything else, human emancipation depends 
on woman finding her right position in the Social Organism. 
The time has already arrived for commencing the p>ractical 
solution of this question. Progress waits on it. If man 
exceeds woman in strength of body, and has a more sub- 
stantial mental organization, she possesses an enchanting 
physical loveliness, and a superiority with respect to certain 
intellectual qualities, to which he is indebted for his most 
vivid sensations of delight. This renders her to him, what 
the blossoms and foliage of the tree are to the body and 
roots thereof. Woman is more than man's equal, so sure as 
the being that he spontaneously, really ', and necessarily 
adores, is above him ; and she will be far more than at 
present, the object of man's adoration, when humanity is 
perfected. Between unsophisticated lovers, the very acme 
of delight is spontaneous adoration on the part of the man, 
and the reception of it on that of the woman 9 r and the 
adored must be considered superior to the adorer, when ado- 
ration is spontaneous, and delightfully accorded, rather than 
when it is extorted by fear. If man ungallantly tells woman 
that — "the beautiful could not exist, but for the substan- 
tial," she can truly retort, and generally with an air that 
will bow him ecstatic at her feet, " but the substantial 
would soon wish itself out of existence were it not for the 
beautiful." Woman's rights can never be secured by her 
competing with man in his sphere. If he yields, she will be 
only the pitiable recipient of charity. If he competes with. 



KELIGTu-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 29 

all his force, lier rights will be far more brutally trampled 
on than they now are. 

Are not exceedingly beautiful women deified even now ? 
and are not woman's rights very perceptibly more secure in 
proportion to woman's physical and intellectual beauty? A 
beautiful woman enters a crowded car. All the men rise, 
as if magically operated upon, to give her a seat. A rather 
ugly one enters. If she is not so old as to excite pity, she 
will stand some time before any one will offer her a chance 
to sit down. Develop the physical, and the moral will take 
care of itself. In the coquetry which shallow philosophers 
and blindly stupid moralists sneer at, there is a most 
important, and, in the economy of nature, a most valuable 
reality. 

Of course, the members of the true Church could neither be 
hoaxed into voting — into being the mere chess-men of politi- 
cal gamblers, nor fooled into law-suits. They would settle 
their own differences among themselves, or by an appeal to 
their religio-governmental dignitaries, who would know that 
their own interests were as inseparable from those of their 
fellow-citizens, as the interests of the head are from those of 
the body. They would avoid differences with the rest of 
the world as much as possible, and in no emergency conde- 
scend to enter their inextricably perplexing arena — " law." 
Pending the existence of laws against collecting debts (for 
that is exactly what all laws ostensibly for collecting debts 
amount to), they would stick as close to the cash system of 
trade as possible. 

As this practically good, and really free Church and 
State organization enlarged its area and extended its opera- 
tions, it would harmoniously regulate, instead of arbitrarily 
governing, everything; agriculture, manufactures, com- 
merce — all. In architecture, man would have the advantage 
of chemical and biological science with respect to ventila- 
tion. In the matter of clothing, the tailor and dress-maker, 
and especially their customers, would have the inestimable 
advantage derivable from the knowledge of the physician. 
The hygienic department would also see that grain was har- 
vested and fruit gathered, and cookery done, immeasurably 
more to the advantage of health and longevity than they 
now are. Quack liberty ignores science in the social 
economy, or else commits the equal folly of supposing that 
every individual can master all science. The bogus consti- 
tutional and sham legal freedom of the members of the body 
politic to murder the whole community by poison, suffoca- 



30 RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

lion, strangulation, and a thousand other means, would be 
wholly disallowed, to their own inestimable advantage. 

"When the power of this freedom-dispensing hierarchy 
arrived at the requisite point, all children born would have 
the advantage of all the physical and intellectual culture 
that the organization to which they belonged could give 
them. They would be wholly at the charge of the State. 
'No reason can be urged against this, that is not equally 
valid against our present public schools, and no reason can 
be given against an universal joint-stock equitable arrange- 
ment of the interests of labor, skill, capital, and all human 
concerns, that is not valid against public libraries, public 
roads, the public defence, and, in short, against everything 
that generally accommodates. 

The first governmental public accommodation, was the 
irrepressible movement toward a universal copartnership 
that will really emancipate labor, sufficiently remunerate 
skill, and perfectly secure capital; in short, enable individu- 
als to exist in society as freely as the planets revolve in the 
solar system ; so free, that between wishing and having 
there will intervene but just exertion enough to give due 
value to possession. 

The founding of a church like the one above sketched 
will be the beginning of the end of anarchy, oppression, and 
wrong. Superstition w r ill thenceforth be rapidly curtailed, 
and good, instead of evil, will as rapidly become spontane- 
ous. 

The first church that successfully commences this great 
revolution, will be the nucleus of the Sun of the religio- 
governmental system that will include the world itself, both 
physical and human. It will include all mankind, and all 
in the human connection : all which acts on man, and is 
therefore, positively or negatively, acted on by man. 

The Cathedral that is in contemplation for Bishop Hughes, 
or the mammoth meeting-house that is in prospect for the 
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, backed by the wealth of a few 
millionaires, and the official aid of the eminent men of sci- 
ence and the artists that wait but a call from such a corpo- 
ration, would probably be successful. At any rate, it would 
be immeasurably more glorious to take the first step in this 
enterprise that is perfectly sure to succeed eventually, though 
it should, pro tempore, fail, than it would be to be Emperor 
or President of the wT>rld, under present circumstances. 
Oh, how pitiably contemptible the mightiest theologically 
constituted inonarchs and demagogues will appenr, and how 



RELIGIO-POLITIC^L PHYSICS. 31 

abominably the names of our most bunkum theo-democratic 
politicians will stink, when man's good opinion is worth 
having — when what we now call man is man. 

What powerful capitalists — what influential clergymen — 
what eminent scientists and artists will take the lead in this 
supremely magnificent revolution (this revolution of revo- 
lutions, that will crown and fructify all former ones), and 
thus gain the inestimable satisfaction of inaugurating 
Heaven on Earth, secure to their names the gloria in excelsis 
of all future ages, and embalm their memories in the grate- 
ful affections of Eternal Man f Of man, when his approba- 
tion shall be an honor ; when he shall be as free, as happy, 
as wise, and as perfect, as the author of "The Religion of 
Science " thus prophetically pictures him : 

" The scene of my vision now rapidly shifted from stage to stage of 
development and progress, till it reached the thirtieth century ;<* the 
substantial glory and magnificence of each succeeding stage, increasing 
in the ratio (in which science and art within our own observation does) 
of the multiplication of numbers by each succeeding product ; till, finally, 
the ice in the Polar regions disappeared, the superfluous thermal activ- 
ity in the Equatorial regions was suitably diminished, and luminous 
action was sufficient everywhere. Sciences on Sciences and Arts on 
Arts had, working with, or according to, nature, fully developed her, 
liberated all her laws, and availed perfectly organized Man of the use of 
all tier force most advantageously combined. 

u The whole earth was cultivated in a manner far superior to that in 
which any portion of it now is. Magnificent palaces, about six miles 
apart, had displaced all the isolated abodes of jealousy, vexation, misery 
and ennui. Children were no longer dreaded as a burden by either pa- 
rent, and were hailed as precious and valuable acquisitions by the 
State, which not only provided for their perfect development as mem- 
bers of it, but honored and remunerated mothers for their bearing and 
suckling, by an equivalent for the loss of time to which they were 
thereby subjected. This remuneration did not consist in silver or gold 
dollars — the coinage of barbarism ; nor in all but or quite worthless 
shin-plasters — the currency of pseudo civilization; but in certificates of 
value based on actual production; or, which amounted to the same 
thing, in stock, by which nearly all property was represented. All 
mankind composed one vast joint stock corporation. 

" Prostitution, either for life, for a single night, or by the job, was of 
course banished. Volcanoes were silenced, tempests were hushed, pes- 
tilence and disease had ceased, and the earth's circulations were as 
genial as were those of the perfectly healthy human body, which had at 
last been realized. 

u Nearly all labor was done by machinery. The balmy air was navi- 
gated by gorgeous balloons. ]STo clothing, except for ornament, was 
necessary, and none other was worn. The women, released by religio- 
governmental science and art; and by enlightened public opinion, from 
every inconvenience connected with free maternity, were all more en- 

* Common Era. 



32 RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

chantingly beautiful than the Houris with which even Asiatic imagina- 
tion has furnished Mahomet's Paradise; they were very Goddesses, 
revelling most voluptuously in the adoration which the equally faultless 
men as voluptuously yielded them. Lovers (and all were such) freely, 
spontaneously, and harmlessly luxuriated in each other's embraces. 

" All were equally beautiful without being alike ; so that the only reason 
for choosing one rather than another was the love of variety. The 
great problem of the reciprocalness of love was solved, by all being so 
faultless, both physically and mentally, that love was universally recip- 
rocal. Restraint was banished, virtue was no more, and vice was obso- 
lete. 

u Throughout perceptible nature, all was perfection; desire was the 
measure of fulfillment ; to will was to have, with the intervention of 
just exertion enough to give due value to possession. 

" Would that I could portray, somewhat in detail, the magnificence, 
the luxury, the bliss, which resulted from the full triumph of the Re- 
ligion and Government of Science. But our now paucity of objects of 
comparison prevents me. Give your imaginations the reins, ye who 
are most gifted in that respect ; stick to coherency, and you cannot go 
astray ; though the most sanguine will fall very far short of the 
glorious reality. 

'' The following is the first Lesson of The Catechism, which I heard 
the children (real flesh and blood angels) in a primary school reciting : 

u Question. Wherein consists the value of all existence ? 

" Answer. In happiness. 

" Q. To what should all human endeavor, therefore, aim ? 

"A. To the acquisition, perfection, and sufficient prolongation of hap- 
piness. 

" Q. How do you know that happiness is rightly the sole object 
for which you should strive ? 

"A. I feel it to be so. I cannot desire anything else. Besides, there 
is nothing else worth aiming at, or even living for. 

u Q. Is it right for you to strive to promote only your own happi- 
ness? 

" A. It is. 

" Q. How do you know it to be right ? 

" A. From the fact that it is impossible for me voluntarily to strive 
for anything else. 

" Q. What guaranty have mankind always had, that perfect and suf- 
ficiently lasting happiness as to the individual, and perfect and eternal 
happiness as to the species, were attainable ? 

u A. Nature's; whose highest consciousness, and intelligence, man is. 
The seed, the hope, the glimmering foreknowledge, of the great harvest 
of happiness which we are now reaping, nature planted in man when, 
through development, she first rough-created him ; and so deep, that it 
never could be uprooted, but must necessarily have come, as it now 
has, to full maturity, to complete verification, where, in virtue of 
nature's law of laws, it must remain, as inexhaustible as the race of 
man is eternal; as perpetual as is the equilibrium of the celestial sphe- 
roids. 

" Q. During the age of mystery, when man was in his primitive imper- 
fection, in his physical and therefore intellectual heterogeneity — what 
name did his bewildered imagination give to the object of his individual 
existence ? 

"A. Eternal happiness. 



RELXGIOPOLITTCAL PHYSICS. 83 

^ Q. Wherein consisted his mistake? 

" A. In not comprehending the Social Organism, or collective man — 
The Eternal Being to whom alone eternal happiness could be happiness ; 
and in not knowing that temporal happiness could be made to last long 
enough to be quite sufficient for the temporal beings which, through 
nature's law of individual change, successively constitute eternal Hu- 
manity. 

" Q. How do you know that our present harvest of perfect happiness 
is inexhaustible, and that our race is fixed in eternal happiness ? 

" A. The laws of the intellectual world follow the rule of those of the 
physical, on which they depend ; and the Social Organism is now as 
harmoniously, and therefore as permanently, adjusted to all in its con- 
nection as is the solar system. Man's — nature's — spontaneous yearning 
for satisfaction has, aided by all in the connection, produced in the world 
of man, that necessarily eternal order which answers to the equilibrium 
which gravitation has, thus aided, produced* in the planetary world. 
The eternal happiness of collective man, and the perfect and sufficiently 
lasting happiness of individual man are, therefore, as assured as is the 
order of the celestial spheroids, 

" Q. In what relation do you stand toward all mankind? 

u A. All mankind, from the first inseparably, though for a long time 
heterogeneously connected, are now, happily, a harmoniously organ- 
ized whole ; of which I am a part, in as strict sympathy with all the 
other parts, as the most minute tissues of my body are in sympathy with 
all the rest of it. 

" Q. It seems, then, that you cannot do an act which will promote 
your own happiness, without simultaneously doing one which must pro- 
mote the good of all mankind ; nor can you do an act fraught with evil 
to others, which will not surely redound to your own hurt. Do you 
comprehend all this ? 

"A. As easily as I understand that my whole body shares the sensa- 
tion of dissatisfaction caused by the prick of a needle on the end of my 
little finger, or that of satisfaction, caused by the contact of my palate 
with food ; or that of delight, caused by my eyes beholding, my ears 
hearing, and my brains understanding, the pleasure which all around me 
experience. 

" Q. But though you are as really, you are not as closely connected 
with the rest of mankind, as the parts of your body are with yourself. 
How does the body politic immediately bring its all-sufficient power to- 
bear in preventing wrong action ? 

" A. By means of that body's nerves and brain — its Scientific Dis- 
coverers and Directors. By means of these, I acquire the aid of the 
whole force of the body politic and of all else in the connection, and 
am thus enabled to shape my actions in accordance with the social 
organism's welfare, and simultaneously with the welfare of every part 
of it, necessarily including myself. My functions, like those of the mass 
of mankind, are special : those of a few, but naturally sufficient num- 
ber, are general. 

" Q. Are you and your compeers who compose the mass of mankind, 
then, but mere blind followers of your superiors ? 

u A. Blind? no indeed. Our understandings, and particularly our 
feelings, are constantly wide awake to the results which acting in 
accordance with the directions of our social functionaries pro- 
duces. For the rest, we have no superiors in any arbitrary sense of the 
word. 

2* 



31 KELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS, 

" Q. But what guaranty have you that your general function 
aries will not misguide you, or shape your action for their own special 
benefit ? 

"A. They can no more be benefited by injuring us, than my indi- 
vidual nerves and brain can be benefited by damaging my muscles; 
and they know it. They know that our wretchedness would necessitate 
their misery ; that the only difference between their woes and ours 
would be that theirs would be gilded and ours but varnished. We, the 
masses, have the same guaranty that our Scientific Discoverers and 
Directors will not wrong us, that my hand has, that my nerves and brain 
will not misdirect it into the fire. 

" Here the first Lesson ended ; and music, instrumental and vocal, 
incomparably more fairy-like than any I had ever yet heard, fell on the 
charmed ear, and the rest of the session was spent in all that could 
enliven instruction and render it attractive." 

§ 11. BUSINESS PANICS. 

But we want something immediately practical ; we want 
manufacturers " going ahead," a " smashing trade " doing, 
"confidence restored" to credit, money plenty, secession 
quieted, and the negro-question settled right away, clamor 
the short-sighted, impatient multitude. 

To those who think their deepest when they talk thus, I 
have said nothing, and shall say nothing respecting how 
religio-go vera mental science and art will produce their per- 
fectly satisfactory results. Not that I despise " The People," 
or entertain the slightest disrespect for their judgment, but 
the contrary. I would not mock them. Their views are (in 
accordance with nature's perfect economy) special; mine, 
the powers that have constituted me have made general, or 
more comprehensive. I honor the masses in their proper 
sphere ; in the only sphere in which they have ever shown 
capability to benefit themselves. Let them extend to me the 
same civility, follow the prescription that I am, by the All 
and in All, constituted to give, and judge by the result. 
Have they not over and over tried all else sufficiently to 
learn that they thereby only continue the doubly deceived 
and betrayed dupes — the mere tools of those miserable 
demagogues who are making them supremely ridiculous, 
and who, equally blind and self-duped, are leading the way, 
deeper and deeper into the present social quagmire ? Have 
"The People" not been long enough fooled by political 
quacks, whose special applications change but do not cure — ■ 
whose soi-disant u practical measures " are but a miserable 
series of delusive experiments that shift the diseased Social 
Organism's position, only to make its maladies more and 
more chronic and the cure more complicated ? 



RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 35 

Away with such temporizing, as fast as possible ; social 
ills can no more be cured suddenly, than the most chronic 
bodily ills can. The public can no more bound from its 
present complication of the deepest seated and most chronic 
social maladies into real prosperity, than some quack-pill 
can instantaneously cure scrofula — than an impatient novice 
can jump into Greek, Latin, Arithmetic, etc., etc., without 
first learning the alphabet and the figures. 

§ 12. WAGES-SLAVERY AND CHATTEL-SLAVERY. 

The American Ship of State is in the very breakers of 
dissolution. The bar on which she is splitting, is the fol- 
lowing clause in u The Constitution."* " No person held to 
service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escap- 
ing into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regu- 
lation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but 
shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such 
service or labor may be due." 

I trust that those to whom I have been appealing have 
become convinced of the transitory and at best provisional 
nature of all hitherto religion, law, governments, and even 
constitutions ; that " The Constitution" was but the highest 
step in progress that America could attain to seventy-three 
years ago ; that if it was for all future ages, science, art, 
and all improvements, are fallacies ; that the time is surely 
approaching w T hen no one will " owe service or labor," either 
as a chattel-slave or wages-slave; or shall serve a less 
august master than the real, the substantial, the intelligible 
Almighty ; nor shall work at all except on conditions dic- 
tated by himself; conditions that will secure to himself per- 
fect and sufficiently lasting happiness. 

I have herein-before advocated the licensing and provi- 
sionally regulating of all evil, until it can be done away with ; 
we should thus never for a moment have lost sight of the 
important fact, that society at large is the principal party to 
all evil or " crime" and the commonest capacity will be 
able to perceive that all government hitherto constituted is 
but licensed, somewhat regulated, wholesale brigandage, at 

* They who are breaking up " the Union," equally with those who are try- 
ing to hold it together, claim to act in accordance with that altogether too 
accommodating political weathercock, " The Constitution, " and profess the 
most patriotic and unwavering devotion to that immaculate indefinitencss. 
How much longer shall mankind be mocked and betrayed by governments 
founded on mystery, transcendentalism, metaphysics, subjectism ; in short, 
unintelligibility ? 



36 EKLrGIO-POLITTCAX PHYSICS. 

length so ripe for destruction, that it ought to give way, as 
fast as possible, to a religio-governmental system, founded 
on science and art. 

Let this doctrine be preached and practiced, and let the 
perfection point he constantly in view, and evil will give 
way through a system of gradual, but faster and faster 
reduction, and those most abominable of all quack methods, 
cauterization or excision — punishment and bloody and devas- 
tating revolution, will never more be applied. 

There is no class of southern slaves, the average length 
of whose lives is not much greater than is that of the lives 
of the sewing girls, and many classes of laborers and me- 
chanics at the North, although the Caucasian race is natu- 
rally longer lived than the African race, and has the 
advantage of a more congenial climate. 

Licensing the African slave-trade, instead of vainly try- 
ing to prevent it, would, long ago, have rendered the human 
chattel system unprofitable throughout all this land, the fer- 
tility of which is not, like that of Egypt, recuperable through 
the overflowing of rivers ; and immediately have given 
whole States like Missouri, and particularly Virginia, the 
advantage of a system of human slavery much worse for the 
sufferers, but which must, nevertheless, be the connecting 
link between chattel-slavery and an equitable adjustment of 
the claims of labor, skill, and capital. For the advocates 
of wages-slavery boast, in effect, that the deceitful, fraudu- 
lent emancipation they contend for, extorts twice as much 
unrequited toil as does honestly acknowledged, undisguised 
slavery. And that it extorts four or five times the ingenuity, 
or brain-labor, that direct slavery does, and is proportion- 
ally more productive, is amply proven by the fact that 
northern man-owners are much more wealthy than are 
southern ones. Keep it in mind, that man's labor con- 
stitutes all of value in man, that either northerners or 
southerners own. 

Licensing the slave-trade would have put a great damper 
on Caucasian and African amalgamation, that fruitful 
source of insurrection, and would rapidly have abolished the 
breeding of chattel-slaves in some States to supply a market 
in others, and the accompanying cruelty of separating chil- 
dren from chattel-slave parents much more sensitive than are 
wild Africans. I say chattel-slave parents, that the reader 
may not forget that wages-slavery also most heart-rendingly 
separates parents from children, and wives from husbands, 
and as often, too, probably, as does chattel-slavery. I have 



RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 37 

spent a year amidst " the institution " of the South, and 
must confess that my feelings were never more wounded 
there, by the sight of family separations at the auction-block, 
than they have been often and again at the steamboat land- 
ings in New York, when emigrants from the east were, ly 
necessity as stem as the last blow of an auctioneer's hammer, 
compelled to separate, parents from children, brothers and 
sisters from each other, and wives from husbands, amidst 
sobs as audible and sighs as deep as any I had ever heard 
in or about the " slave-pens." 

But the great difficulty is the way of licensing African 
importation was the opposition of the government of Eng- 
land ; and, apropos oi its objecting to slavery in any form, 
unless it directs its attention with respect to it straight home- 
ward, the reader is requested to turn these leaves backward, 
and read a note on page 7. 

The white slave-owners of England and our northern 
States pay a round license for their most artfully disguised 
piracy^ that supports alms-houses wherein more human 
woe exists than would, in all probability, on board regulated 
slave-ships. Eead Oliver Twist, and visit our " poor-houses," 
and form your judgments in the case. 

If it can be shown that Protestantism is the height of religi- 
ous reform, that human liberation can never proceed beyond 
I infidelity," demagoguocracy, and wages-slavery, let such 
names as Huss, Luther, Eousseau, Paine, Washington, 
Lafayette^ Fourier, and Aoguste Comte, be consigned to 
eternal infamy, and let all emancipationists be suppressed as 
miscreants who are wantonly disturbing — well, I had like to 
have said — the peace! 

But if, on the contrary, it has been, (as I claim it has by 
myself, aided by those who have studied this vast subject 
before me,) shown that perfect human liberation is prac- 
tical, then, every clause in " The Constitution," and every 
"enacted" law has got to succumb to the fate that has 
already befell so many kindred barbarisms ; and it is as use- 
less to contend against this, as it would be to make decrees to 
stop gravitation. 

In view of this let us go lovingly, calmly, scientifically, and 
artistically to work to displace evil by good, and we shall, 
more and more rapidly, and, at last, with a suddenness and 
ease that will make every one wonder why it had not been 
done ages before, establish Heaven on Earth. 

To talk about its being wrong for man to own property in 
man, is the most drivelling twaddle — the most short-sighted 



38 



RELIGIOPi -LITICAL PHYSICS. 



imbecility. Man never owned any other property and nevei 
can. Is the negro, or his labor, that which constitutes all 
the value of ownership ? Evidently, the white laborer of 
the North and the black laborer of the South are equally 
owned ; the latter, by a master who has an immediate 
interest in providing for his grosser necessities, the former by 
a master w r ho has not even that poor incentive in his favor. 
Tlie whole question evidently is, to make man's property in 
man mutually and universally beneficent. 

If our southern States shall be so tyrannized over by a 
wretched mob, led on by bankrupt demagogues, and disap- 
pointed and therefore desperate politicians, as to dissolve 
the Union, cha'ttel-slavery will come to the same crisis that 
wages-slavery is in the throes of in continental Europe, is 
on the very eve of in England, and is fast verging to in our 
northern States ; not to cure, but only to render the horrible 
disease more chronic, and the cure more complicated. 

But machinery is fast bringing to a final crisis both 
wages-slavery and chattel-slavery, as is manifest by the vast 
amount of human muscle it throws into armies, filibustering 
expeditions, alms-houses, and itinerant mendicancy ; and 
by the multitudes of females it is plunging into the maelstrom 
of prostitution. 

I know, indeed, that political economists deceive them- 
selves and their readers into the idea that machinery w T orks 
as well for the poor as for the rich, by making the neces- 
saries of life more accessible ; but the more and more rapid 
growth of the abominations I have just alluded to, flatly 
belies their theory. With the exception of those who are 
employed in making and tending machinery, what but loss 
and ruin does the laborer derive from it ? Take the num- 
ber of the unemployed, including paupers, and of the 
employed, and average the amount of their labor. Retrace 
history one hundred years, or even fifty, and do the same; 
and see if the average muscle-power exerted now, pro- 
duces anything like the amount of human comforts it did 
then. 

And they who do not calculate that machinery will, before 
long, make the power of even chattel-enslaved muscle 
unprofitable even in the bottom-lands of America, are very 
blind, or else I am. It would not be stranger than w T as the 
discovery of the electro-magnetic telegraph and the sewing- 
machine, if some cute Yankee should do that identical thing 
some clear morning before breakfast. 

"Well, even in that ease," methinks I hear too many; 



EELTGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 39 

Patriarchs exclaim, " we sliall want our negroes for waiters 
and body-servants." Nay, gentlemen, the attainment of the 
stage in progress just alluded to, will necessitate a recon- 
struction of society so thorough, that, if you have never 
studied the subject before, were I to describe it, you would 
think yourselves reading a new chapter in the " Arabian 
Nigte*" instead of a strictly scientific, though prospective 
portrayal. 

Gentlemen, the isolated abodes of false selfishness, 
jealousy, ennui, discontent ; in short, misery, both North and 
south, will, at the stage of progress just alluded to, rapidly 
give place to palaces of delight, as magnificent as imagina- 
tion can paint ; in w T hich, breakfasts, dinners, suppers, lodg- 
ings, clean linen, and elegant apparel, will, without either 
slaves or servants, be furnished, unattended by the blows, 
scolding, and disappointment that now accompany our pre- 
sent wretched mockery of both comforts and pleasures. - 

And what is to be done with this great question of 
machinery against muscle ? Is it not high time to have 
done with blinking it ? To what point in beggary and star- 
vation do those who, as capitalists and discoverers or 
" inventors" own machinery, expect that they who make 
and tend it will, even as quietly as they now do, reduce 
themselves % 

The unemployed muscle of Europe is now in imminent 
battle-array, and the clouds that hang so ominously over 
our own political horizon, are, in sober fact, charged with 
the thunder of the labor question, that can never be settled 
short of an adjustment that w T ill give all a share in 
what little labor will need to be done, and an equitable 
amount of the profits which such labor, in connection with 
the skill and capital that it will make profitable, will pro- 
duce. 

If the strife between the money-barons and their serfs ever 
comes to blows in good earnest, the battle will be far 
bloodier than was that between the feudal barons and their 
serfs. But no. Continental Europe is not going to be given 
up to red republicanism, England to levelling chartism, our 
northern States to starvation's saturnalia, nor our southern 
States to Africanization. Nineteenth century advancement 
has vetoed all this. Besides, Europe, and particularly 
France, will never forget the crushing she had under the 
wheels of the car of equality during the Revolution of 
1789 ; the pitiless crushings of the wheels of that dread car 
have, through modern European history, exerted a salutary 



40 RKLIG-IO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

.influence in our northern States, and the massacres of Hayti 
will still significantly and healthfully warn our southern 
brethren, some ugly looking appearances to the contrary 
notwithstanding. 

That the Negro race, and all inferior races will run out, 
is at length demonstrated. In fact, the Caucasian race 
itself will be completely transformed. The succeeding 
transcendently superior races of human beings will be pre- 
cisely all that the most lively coherent imagination can 
desire : and different from, without being, in the main, 
inferior to each other. 

In order to prevent a violent crisis of wages-slavery, and 
gradually and peaceably end that abomination, there must 
be adopted measures as different from alms-giving, as pro- 
ductive industry is different from industrious mendicancy; 
soup-committees, alms-houses, and street-charities but aug- 
ment the evil they so blindly try to cure. 

And in order that chattel-slavery may die out peaceably, 
the States wherein it exists must turn, their attention, not to 
the prevention and reclamation of runaways, but to the 
best method of getting seasonably, quietly and effectually 
rid of their discontented slaves, especially if they happen 
to be mulattoes. 

Mulattoes are as much more than half Caucasian, as the 
Caucasian blood is superior to that of the African ; and to 
argue that they can be enslaved, either by the lash-smart 
or the starvation-spur, either individually or nationally, 
without danger, is to ignore the battle of Bunker Hill, and 
deny that there ever was such a thing as rebellion, signalized 
by carnage and devastation. 

Where the African race has been crossed by the Cau- 
casian, slavery, of whatever kind, is evidently most degrad- 
ing to the latter ; and they who think that white blood can 
be enslaved without danger of insurrection, by mingling it 
with black blood, have simply studied natural history back- 
ward, provided that they ever examined the subject at all, 
except with the eyes of that narrow, gross, false self-regard, 
that is the sure precursor of self-destruction. 

During ten years past, the slave-rendition clause in " The 
Constitution" has been enforced only in "that mock-sense in 
which "the Sabbath" has been kept sacred by the noisy 
disturbance necessary to a police descent on social and 
peaceable dancers, theatre-goers and actors, and lager beer 
tasters. It is safe to calculate — in fact, the advocates of the 
eternal fulfillment of the slave clause acknowledge — that 



RELTGI0-P0L1TICAL PHYSICS. 41 

every slave returned in accordance with it, has cost his 
owner, on the average, three times his value, and the 
government from five to ten times that amount; ignoring, 
for the sake of the main argument, how much less than 
nothing all slaves who, of their own accord run awav, are 
really worth. 

- If some practical disposition was made of the rendition 
clause # in " The Constitution," a contract, providing for the 
rendition of those, whether white or black, who were 
fugitives from States where they had been stirring up, or 
trying to stir up, insurrection, could unquestionably be 
rigidly enforced, as long as there would be any occasion for 
so doing. Come, brothers, let's not take leave of our 
rationality; for 'twill be as vain and unprofitable to break 
limbs, scatter brains, and let out bowels over this affair, as it 
was for Paddy to insist thatJiie captain who had agreed to 
[' take him over the sa " should " stick to his bargain," even 
if the ship did sink. 

Nothing is plainer, than that, throughout nature, the 
weaker must succumb to the stronger ; and this necessarily 
involves neither tyranny, oppression, nor injustice, but the 
very reverse. What could be more oppressive, tyrannical 
or unjust, than for the inferior to rule, or even be admitted 
to equality (if such a scheme can be even imagined in 
practice) with the superior? Under such a regime, how 
long would it be before all that was either beautiful or utile 
in nature would be extinguished, and this prospectively fair 
world of ours be reduced to a disgusting muck heap ? 

Until we look to entire reorganization in religion and 
government, every sect and party will, and with truth, 
scornfully toss at every other one the barren truism — we are 
no worse than you are; and the advocates of chattel owner- 
ship of human beings, and those of the wages ownership of 
them, will continue, and with equal justice and spite, to 
hurl the slavery epithet into each other's faces, 
j. Brothers of the human race, East, West, North, and 
South, let us lay aside passion, enmity, and spite, and bring 
to our rescue all the wisdom, science, and art that we pos- 
sess. For only by means of these, and the aid of our com- 
mon Father and God— Material Nature— can evil be dis- 
placed by good. 

When the Roman Catholic phase of supernaturalism was 
breaking up, those in authority perpetrated deeds which all 
remember with horror, and which constructive revolution- 
ists and comprehensive thinkers look back on with humili- 



42 BELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

ation, regret, and pity, near akin to shame that they belong 
to the human race. Now that supernaturalism itself is 
breaking np, let those in power, especially in the " Model 
Republic," take warning by the past, and not commit deeds 
that will consign them to the agonies of remorse, unless they 
are, considering the age in which they live, unpardonably 
ignorant, and send their names to posterity coupled with 
such execrations as are heaped on those of the infernally 
Holy Inquisitors and their governmental abettors, most of 
whom unquestionably were, however, far more sincere and 
conscientious than any human tormentors can now claim to 
be. 

§ 13. PENAL CODES THEIR OWN NEMESIS. 

Throughout the whole domain of science, nothing can be 
more certain, than that the amount of criminality justly 
chargeable to an individual, cannot exceed the proportion 
which such individual's power bears to the power of the 
whole human race. Therefore penal statutes are as consum- 
mate quackery as a continual application of the scalpel's 
edge to the external manifestations of small pox, in order 
to effect a cure, would be. 

What ! charge the iniquity of all mankind to a single 
individual, and, with a force of a thousand millions against 
one, murder an unresisting prisoner in cool blood? JDelibe 
rately, and with assassinous intent, twist a rough hemp cord 
around the tender neck of a defenceless human victim, till 
the joints are dislocated, the eye-balls forced from their 
sockets, the tongue squeezed horribly from the mouth, 
the facial veins burst, and death, as if in pity, ends the 
agony ? 

And, sometimes (unless 'tis an infernal dream), "man,"(?) 
armed, and regularly commissioned by the power and 
authority of the whole State, draws the murderous halter 

around the fair neck of "WOMAN ! Is " Earth," 

really, Hell ? Are " human beings," in truth, Devil-incar- 
nations ? 

In deliberately u punishing crime," society commits an 
act that degrades man far below beasts ; none of whom 
inflict death, or any lesser evil, without the plea of necessity, 
instinct, passion, or accident. But it will not be long before 
science will transcend that erring mountebank, reason, in 
the government of mankind. 

But I am not going to minutely examine and expose the 
fallacy of " punishing " " crime." That would require a large 



RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 43 

volume. I mean to thrust straight home to the very heart 
of this abomination ; to show in a very few words, that the 
blindly malicious and stupid advocates of u punishment " 
defeat their own professed aims ; that all penalties, in ad- 
dition to those which necessarily follow a breach of real 
law, augment the very evils they are applied to cure, and 
in an exact ratio, other things being equal, to their severity. 

The death-penalty always elevates the sufferer thereof to 
a hero; generally to a saint; and often to a martyr. As 
to its preventive effects : Treason involves this penalty ; yet 
our " Model Republic " was spawned of treason, and several 
of the States w T hich compose it are now in the midst of the 
very saturnalia of treason, if we are to take for their repre- 
sentatives those whom popular rule lias de facto constituted 
such.* 

" Hang the demagogues who are now preaching treason, 
and every mobocrat they head," say the short-sighted 
friends of our miserable apology for " law and order," in the 
very face and eyes of the wholesale failure of their favorite 
scheme. 

Nay, sirs, let's have no more hanging. If you must have 
some revenge on those who have immediately disturbed that 
chronic armistice that the world calls peace ! for the last few 
weeks, f who have thus damaged the public prosperity to 
the amount, to speak within bounds, of more than it w T ould 
cost to build the Pacific railroad, and created a riot that will 
not probably end without murder, let me propose a substi- 
tute for the hanging or even imprisoning scheme, and let 
this be the last vestige of punishment that man can inflict on 
his fellow man. Only in that hope would I propose it. The 
horrible side of the punishment enormity has long and ably 
been held up. I will try what exposing its absurdity can 
effect. 

Let the order-abiding portion of the community, if they 
must have some revengeful " satisfaction " for past offences, 
" enact " a " law " (and let this be the last " law " ever 



* A government, the real agent of the people, never existed. When those 
whom the caucus and ballot-box scheme declares the people's agents happen 
to be honest, when they refuse to accept the bribe of a clique or an individual 
to pass this or that law, or pursue this or that measure, it is a mere mutter of 
generosity — a sort of imperially exercised grace. Let any one watch the 
lobby during a session of the Legislature ; or, if he could, get access to the 
private conferences which our Presidents, Governors, Mayors, and " elected" 
Judges hold, and see who the real governors of all Democracies and Republics 
are. 

f This was written January 8, 1861. 



44 EELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

"enacted") that all demagogues whose machinations have 
disturbed the usual tranquillity, or who shall have willfully 
originated, or in any way assisted, schemes whereby the 
public have been, either swindled or hoaxed, under pretext, 
of government, and such of the mob who have maliciously 
followed them as can be caught, together with all who have 
voluntarily aided or abetted them, either openly or surrep- 
titiously, directly or indirectly, shall be publicly turned butt 
end upward over some official knee, and, after a prayer by 
some devout clergyman, have their bare posteriors solemnly 
spanked by the hands of the common hangman. 

This would not be a martyrdom that any one would be 
proud of having suffered, and it would be a perfect damper, 
to all heroism in the case. Not even the sword and epaulets 
of a cavalier whose seat of honor had, in accordance with 
" law and order," been publicly hand-slapped, would cause 
a lady's hand to wave, or her heart to sigh. 

And would any demagogue who had, with all the for- 
malities of "law" and " religion," had his bare butt-end 
publicly spanked, ever " stump it " afterward % Could the 
gravity of any audience stand the sight of the face of an 
orator who had compulsorily, yet legally, appeared before 
them with his breech uppermost, and with that most comical 
substitute for his gammon-laboratory respectfully uncovered ? 
"Would not the reminiscences that would spontaneously 
arise, cause irrepressible laughter to drown the most bunkum 
eloquence ? 

The law here recommended is lesa brutal and shameful 
than the one we now have, by the vast difference between 
breaking men's necks and a moderate application of the open 
hand to a rather insensible part. And I earnestly ask all who 
are capable of judging in the case, if they do not candidly 
believe that if these spanked political burglars, swindlers, 
thieves, or humbugs, resorted to the pen, instead of to the 
rostrum or stump, they, and all aspirants for public office, 
would take better care than they ever have done that their 
schemes in behalf of the sovereignty of the dear people, 
and for enlarging the area of freedom, should not be 
treacheries gotten up to serve their own mean, narrow, mis- 
taken interests, well knowing that if they brought disaster 
on the country, they would, as some slight compensation, 
have to furnish it with laughing-stocks and butts for 
ridicule ? 

I most earnestly invite our honorable judges, particularly 
our chief justices, our worthy President of the United j 



KELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 45 

States, and equally worthy Mayor of New York, together 
with some of our most prominent members of Congress and 
of the Common Council of our city aforesaid, to consider 
the feasibility, and contemplate the effect, of trying the 
experiment of such a " law " as I have proposed, on several 
hundred of the most infernal " scoundrels " in this country. 

Don't let me be thought joking. I solemnly protest that 
I never was more serious in my life than! am, in declaring 
that it is my unshakable conviction, that if even common 
murderers, brigands, and thieves were treated with that 
mild barbarity I have just pleaded for in behalf of wholesale 
" criminals," murderers would be less common than now, 
meaner criminals would decrease, and those who still per- 
sisted would be far less dangerous to society than they are 
after being goaded to desperation by a few years' torture in 
our infernal prisons. 

Away with punishment altogether. It's a disgrace to 
countries as barbarous as Algiers or Dahomey. Tiie most 
benighted tribe in Africa has nothing more savage. 'Tis 
a legacy we inherited from savagism itself, and society 
becomes ashamed of it, and drops its practice exactly in 
proportion as man becomes refined. The last relic of it will 
cease, when man is perfected. 

Let the great, but most simple truth, that no breach of 
real law ever did or ever can avoid its due penalty, that 
the interests of the human race are inseparably connected, 
and that nature will, through science, art, and lower material 
development, prove all-sufficient, be erected into a creed, 
taught in Sunday-schools, and made universally public, and 
let consistent action be taken thereon, and all transgression, 
from the meanest to that of even national magnificence, 
will soon cease. 

Needs there any argument or demonstration to prove 
that inflicting evil on evil only augments evil? Surely 
nothing can be more absurd and ridiculous than revenge. 

The true cause of " crime," or " moral evil," is, that 
creation is incomplete. The parts of the Universal Organ- 
ism, or all which to, in and through man exists, have got to 
be adjusted so that they will not clash; so that they will 
not chafe, even ; and man has got to do this. He has got 
to finish creation — to set it in order, before he can be 
accommodated therein. For he is the sensible head of all 
in his connection. His is the highest intelligible intelli- 
gence. The instant we talk about mind abstracted from its 
material organs, our words have clean parted company 



46 RELIGIO-POLITICAL PHYSICS. 

with meaning, and we find ourselves sinking deeper and 
deeper into the bottomless depths of nonsense.* 

It the wheels, and springs and cranks of a cutlery manu- 
factory should clash, and chafe, and injure each other, what 
epithet, but that of fool, or madman, would be applied to 
those who had charge of it, should they fly into a passion, 
expel some, and bend and break others, invader to make 
them work right ? Or, if the faultiness wastry bad, treat 
the whole building to volleys of musketry and broadsides of 
cannon, in order to mend matters? Would not such over- 
seers be considered only fit to tenant a madhouse ? Well, 
far worse fools and madmen are the penal law-givers who 
have charge of that embodiment of all the complications of 
mechanism — the Social Organism. The conditions for good 
must be provided, before good can result, equally in the case 
of man, or in that of coarser materiality. And all attempts 
to promote well-doing, except according to this rule, are 
folly or quackery, and must result, as they always have 
done, in failure, or worse calamity. 

" Evil," or " crime," will wholly cease, only when . the 
whole human race form one Social Organism, governed by 
those scientific enough to know that any malpractice on 
their part, will be suicidal, and so perfectly fitted to the 
Universal Organism, or all in man's connection, as to con- 
trol it to the extent that to desire will be to have, with the 
exception (if it can truly be called an exception) of just 
exertion enough to give due value to possession, and that 
individual conscious existence will continue till all the 
varieties of happiness presentable to the five senses, exhaust 
their value by repetition. 

Leaders of mankind, your true function is to organize all 
this ; and when you set yourselves about it dispassionately, 
scientifically, and in a w r orkmanly manner, you will realize 
Heaven on Earth so suddenly, that the only wonder will be 
that it had not been done before. 

* The beautiful and regular pictures of shrubbery which the crystallization I 
of frost forms on the sidewalk after a sudden thaw, is sufficient, in the case 
of such as have understandings more comprehensive than are those of the 
masses, to nullify all the arguments that can be adduced to prove "the 
existence of the supernatural designer," about whom the apostles of mystery 
and balderdash have so long astounded their hearers, whilst picking their 
pockets. 



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adultery 



tMJRTmEiMMJBMlTr MOOI£S. : 

"All Nature is but Art less understood.'* — Pope. 

The Religion of Science ; or, The Art of Actualizing Li- 
berty, and of Perfecting, and Sufficiently Prolonging Happiness : 
Being a Practical Answer to the Great Question — " If you take 
away my Religion, what will you give me in its stead V 12mo. 87c. 

The Essence of Science ; or, The Catechism of Positive So* 
ciolo<ry and Physical Mentality. 12mo. 60c. and 37c. 

The New Crisis; or, Our Deliverance from Priestly Fraud. 
Political Charlatanry and Popular Despotism. 13c. 



LIBERAL BOOKS. 3 

Hell on Earth! Murder, Rape, Robbery, Swindling and 
Forgery Covertly Organized. Cannibalism made Dainty ! An Ex- 
posure of the Infernal Machinations and Horrible Atrocities of 
Whited Sepulcherism ; together with A Sure Plan for its Speedy 
Overthrow. 18c. 

The Life of Thomas Paine, Mover of the " Declaration of 
Independence ;" Secretary of Foreign Affairs under the first Ameri- 
can Congress ; Member of the National Convention of France ; 
Author of " Common Sense," "The Crisis," "Rights of Man," "Age 
of Reason," etc.: THE MAN, whose motto was " The World is my 
Country ; to do good, my Religion." Embracing Practical Consider- 
ations on Human Mights ; demonstrating that Man tends irrepressi- 
bly to Actual Freedom ; and showing A Liberty-Aim Connection in 
the action of the World's Three Great Author-Heroes — Rousseau, 
Paine, and Comte. By the Author of "The Religion of Science." 
With elegantly engraved Portraits of Rousseau, Paine, and Comte. 
12mo , cloth. 50c. 

The five preceding works are all by the same author. He takes the 
ground that "Free Government can be nothing less than the Art of 
Arts, to which True Religion must be its corresponding Science of Sci- 
ences; and they who preach liberty from any other stand-point, are 
either circumscribed, weak, deluded, or so abominably corrupt, and so 
blind to true self-interest, as to mean spoils;" that "nature is all-suffi- 
cient ;" that therefore, u through science, art, and spontaneous develop- 
ment, the highest theories will prove to be practicabilities." For u subjec- 
tivity cannot transcend objectivity ; ideas are not innate, or supersensuous ; 
mind, will, desire, are functional of material organism, and cannot, 
therefore, wander beyond nature. Man is the highest organism ; he is 
nature's head; his will, therefore, really is nature ] s will ; and nature's 
will must be the measure of her power and of her resources, and these 
must be adequate to the realization of the highest conceivable bliss ; and 
the religious instinct which mentally distinguishes man from low T er ani- 
mals, is the index which points to the goal of development — to complete 
creation. The human race, therefore, w r ill achieve on earth the perfec- 
tion of happiness which man now mistakenly looks for after death. 
Men and women will be as beautiful and every way as perfect as " angels " 
are imagined to be ; and life will, by natural means, be so lengthened 
that perfect happiness will last till all the varieties of it which can be 
presented to the five senses exhaust their value by repetition. "Heaven," 
and " eternal happiness " are but glimmering, distance-dimmed views of 
the veritable u Paradise" which science, art, and spontaneous develop- 
ment will secure to man in this substantial sphere." 

No other writer has so clearly shown how to eliminate theology, and 
its loathsome train of moral, political and social evils. 



The Creed of Christendom : Its Foundations and Super- 
structure. By William Rathbone Greg. $1 25. 

" No candid reader of the ' Creed of Christendom ' can close the book 
without the secret acknowledgment that it is a model of honest investi- 
gation and clear exposition ; that it is conceived in the true spirit of 
serious and faithful research; and that whatever the author wants of 



4 LIBERAL BOOKe 

being an ecclesiastical Christian, is plainly not essential to the noble 
guidance of life, and the devout earnestness of the affections." — Went- 
minster Review. 

The Doctrine of Inspiration: Being an Inquiry concern- 
ing the Infallibility, Inspiration and Authority of Holy Writ. By 
the Rev. John Macnaught, M.A. Oxon., Incumbent of St. Chrysos- 
tora's Church, Everton, Liverpool. 12mo. $1 37. 

"This work is more significant than any which has appeared since the 
advent of Strauss' c Life of Jesus.' The vulgar idea of the supernatural 
inspiration of the Bible is here abandoned ; and what is more, it is 
shown that many of the chief dignitaries, including four bishops of the 
Church of England, have held, on the sly, similar opinions. The citadel 
of Christian superstition may now be considered as authoritatively sur- 
rendered. 

" It is the first book written by an orthodox clergyman which deci- 
dedly denies the doctrine of Scriptural infallibility. It is well written 
and manly." — Christian Inquirer [Unitarian]. 

What is Truth? or, Revelation its own Nemesis. 12mo. $1. 

" The writer of these letters, in reply to the everlasting enigma, leaves 
not one stone upon another of the Christian temple ; he rests not until 
he has created for himself a new heaven and a new earth, until he can 
kneel down a solitary worshipper at the shrine of justice. 

" We would especially recommend these letters to the more calm, but 
not less convinced author of 'Miracles and Science,' as they contain the 
strongest and most searching objections to which the orthodox scheme 
is exposed." — Leader. 

New Researches on Ancient History : Embracing an 
Examination of the History of the Jews until the Captivity of Ba- 
bylon ; and showing* the origin of the Mosaic Legends concerning 
the Creation, Fall of Man, Flood and Confusion of Languages. By 
C. F. Volney, Count and Peer of France ; Author of " The Kuins, 
or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires," etc., etc. Hand- 
some 12mo., muslin. $1 25. 

Volney's Ruins ; or, Meditations on the Eevolutions of Em- 
pires. To which is added " The Law of Nature," " The Contro- 
versy between Dr. Priestley and Volney," and a Biographical Notice. 
50c. in cloth, 30c. in paper covers. 

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights 

OF WOMAN, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. 
With a Biographical Sketch of the Author. One beautiful volume, 
12mo. 75c. 

Vestiges of Civilization ; or, The JEtiology of History, 
Religious, JEsthetical, Political, and Philosophical. 12mo. $1 25. 

History of Priestcraft in all Ages and Nations. 

By William Howitt. 12mo. 15c. 

A New System of Phrenology. By John S. Hittell. 
12mo. 75c. 

A Plea for Pantheism. By John S. Hittell 25c. 



LIBERAL BOOKS 5 

The Evidences against Christianity. By John S. Hit- 
tell. In two large 12roo. volumes. $2 50. 

The Odic-Magnetic Letters of Baron Reichenbach. 

Translated from the German by John S. Hittell. 37c. 

Somnambulism and Cramp. By Baron Reichenbach. 
Translated by John S. Hittell. 12 mo. $1. 

The Devil's Pulpit ; or, A Series of Astro-Theological Ser- 
mons (some of which were heretofore published in "The Beacon"), 
by the Rev. Robert Taylor, B.A., author of the " Diegesis," " Syn- 
tagma," etc. With a Sketch of his Life, and an Astronomical In- 
troduction. One handsome volume, 12mo. Price $1 25. 

Taylor's Astro-Theological Lectures, being the second 
series of the DeviPs Pulpit, 12mo. $1 37. 

Taylor's Belief not the Safe Side, 10c. 

Taylor's Lectures on Free Masonry, 25c. 

Robert Taylor was one of those rare geniuses in whose waitings the 
most laughter-provoking wit was blended with great learning and pro- 
found research. He shows that all the modern interpretations of the 
" Holy Scriptures " are no more their original meaning, than the lines, 
curves, points, circles, angles, etc., etc., of mathematicians are mathemati- 
cal science. He has found the key to these Scriptures, and clearly shows 
what the sacred writers did mean. In his writings he incidentally embo- 
dies the substance of Du Puy's great work — " Origin of all Religions?' 

The Mystical Quaternity Analyzed ; or, Who is the 

Lord God ? By Robert Taylor. 30 cents. 

Who was Jesus Christ ? By an able critic. 10 cents. 
Who is the Holy' Ghost? By Robert Taylor. 10 cents. 
Who is the Devil? By Robert Taylor. 15 cents. 

Thomas Paine's Theological and Political Works, 

together with His Life, by the author of " The Religion of Science." 
2 vols.,12mo., $2 00. 

Thomas Paine's Political Works. 1 vol., 12mo., $1 00. 

Thomas Paine's Theological Works. Together with 
His Life, by the author of " The Religion of Science." 1 vol., 
12mo., $1 00. 

Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, in paper cover, 25c. ; in 
cloth, 3t cents. 

All the above volumes of Paine's Works, together with his Life, 
have just been published on large, new type, on very fine paper, and 
in substantial binding. Each volume has a fine steel portrait of 
Paine, and the Life (for the full title, see another part of this Cata- 
logue) has fine portraits of Rousseau, Paine, and Comte. 

How to get a Divorce ; together with the Laws of all 
the States of the Union on this subject, and an able plea in favor 
of Free-Love, or Passional Emancipation. By a Member of the 
New York Bar. 25 cents. 



O L.1BKKAL JiuuK.8. 

The Divine and Moral Works of Plato, translated 
from the original Greek, with Introductory Dissertations and Notes. 
First American, from the Sixth Loudon edition, carefully revised 
and corrected from Sydenham and Taylor. $1 25. 

This work embodies the spiritual doctrines and moral sentiments of 
Christianism, and the disciples of Jesus have always been sorely puzzled 
to find out how all this came to be known five hundred years before the 
birth of their Saviour, whose Gospel "brought life and immortality," 
and such wk sublime moral precepts " " to light." The earlier popes made 
strenuous efforts to suppress the works of Plato and Aristotle. 

A Message to The "Sovereign People" of The 
United States; exhibiting to Their Majesties the Infernal 
Treachery or worse Inability of their Keligious Counsellors and of 
their Political " Servants," proving the Identity of the Theologi- 
cal and Ethical Delusions, exposing the Elective Franchise Hoax, 
and Revealing a New and Self-Evidently Efficient Remedy for Su- 
perstition, Despotism and Evil. A Pamphlet of 46 octavo pages. 
By Calvin Blanchard. 10 cents. 15 copies for $1 00. 

£^T All the profits on this publication will be expended in furnish- 
ing Clergymen and Politicians with copies thereof gratis. 

Thorndale ; or, The Conflict of Opinions. By Wm. Smith, 
author of " A Discourse on Ethics.' 7 $1 25. 

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Hand- 
some 12mo. 75 cents. 

Hob*bes (Thomas), The Complete Works of. Elegant Lon- 
don Edition, in 16 volumes, octavo. $16 00. 

j^r Published at $50. Not sent by mail. Only a few copies. 
No discount on this work. 

A Review of " The Trials of a Mind, in its Pro- 
gress to Catholicism." By an ex-Clergyman. 12mo. 15c. 

History of the Institution of the Sabbath Day ; 

Its Uses and Abuses. With Notices of the Puritans, Quakers, etc. 
By William Logan Fisher. 12mo. 62c. 

Introduction to Social Science. By George H. Cal- 
vert. 12mo. 50c. 

Mysticism and its Results. Being an Inquiry into the 
Uses and Abuses of Secrecy. By John Delafield, Esq. 12mo. 37c. 

Conciliation Naturelle du Droit et du Devoir. 
Par Henri Disdier, Avocat. 2 vols., royal 8vo., pp. 1255. $2. 



F> •ASSIGNEE, M OOI£S. 
(Indispensable to students of progress, and the safest that can be put 
into the hands of those who read for amusement, as I shall demonstrate.) 
The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. A New 

Transition, in which not a word of the original is omitted, nor its 



LIBERAL BOOKS. 7 

meaning in any way altered. Two beautiful 12mo. volumes, clotk 
gilt, price $2 50. 

The London edition of "Rousseau's Confessions'* was so scandalously 
deficient of the most recherche passages that the present publisher re- 
jected it altogether, and had the whole work translated afresh, by an able 
scholar, from the French edition of Madame George Sand, wherein had 
been faithfully restored, from the original manuscript sold to the French 
Government by Rousseau's widow, all the passages which, when such 
"virtuous" rulers as Robespierre and Marat governed France, were 
omitted. Reader, the most charming and instructive feat which compo- 
sition ever performed is here truly and faithfully reexhibited. Jean 
Jacques alone has dared to bare the innermost secrets of the human 
heart, and to expose to just abhorrence the abominations which theolo- 
gical moralism had perverted human nature into enacting. 

u There hardly exists such another example of the miracles which 
composition can perform." — Lord Brougham. 

" There have been what purported to be translations of the world-fa- 
mous Confessions of Rousseau before ; but Mr. Calvin Blanchard's is the 
first that we know of which is unmutilated and accurate." — Putnam's 
Monthly. 

"It has been translated into every language in Europe; the librarian 
of Napoleon devoted a large volume to the classification of the different 
editions of it." — Ev. Post. 

Boccaccio's Decameron ; or, Ten Days' Entertainment. In 
one beautiful 18mo. vol., pp. 500, with 18 fine steel engravings. $1. 

The gayest and most gallant literary feast that ever regaled human 
taste. Rehearsing The Decameron kept a large party of fair ladies and 
gallant gentlemen in such a thrill of delight, that the plague which 
ravaged Florence in 1348, passed harmlessly by them. That prince of 
old fogies, grim Death himself, chuckled for once and hurried on. 

The Library of Love. In three neat pocket volumes, 
pp. 803, with fine steel engravings. Sold separately at 50c. each, 
or $1 50 the set. The most amorous and recherche effusions ever 
penned. Comprising : 

I. OVID'S ART OF LOVE, and Amorous Works entire. 

II. BASIA ; The Kisses of Joannes Secundus and Jean Bonnefons. 

III. FABLES FROM BOCCACCIO AND CHAUCER. By 
John Dryden. 

In The Confessions, The Decameron, and The Library op Love, are fairly, 
openly and perfectly exhibited, the hitherto and now workings, under the difficulties 
which old fogyism throws in its way, of the tender passion to which sentient beings 
are indebted for their existence. 

Yet to such a pitch has false religion perverted the rationality of the highest 
order of sentient beings, that some of them are too " chaste*' to read any of the said 
works except privately ; and so very '* modest " as to try to prevent everybody but 
themselves from reading them at all ! 

And stranger still, some even, who flatter themselves that they have abandoned 
false religion, do yet so clingg to that insidious phase of it — moralism — that they 
continue to imagine ignorance to be a safer guardian for virtue than knowledge ! 
: Oh, how ineradicable is inbred falsehood. 

I would insure young ladies and gentlemen against the traps and pitfalls to which 
present institutions expose them, who have read every book in my Catalogue, for 
half the premium for which I would underwrite those whose natural feelings have 
teen so repressed, that pent-up lust crimsons their cheeks with blushes, and casts 



8 LIBERAL BOOKS. 

down their eye-glances with shame, on reading the holy text — "Before the roosts 
crows twice, thou shalt deny me thrice." 

The New York Tribune, in the course of its remarks on the elopement of Mary 
Gurney y the wife of a rich London banker, with her groom, most wisely says : 

" The fashionable mode of treatment may be summed up in the terse injunctions, 
* Cover up !' ' Keep dark V Let all reputable people shut their eyes to the innu- 
merable escapades, ignore (so far as possible) their existence, aud keep all know- 
ledge of them, to the extent of our ability, from the minds of our children, but 
especially of our daughters. And it was under the influence of this system that 
Mary Gurney, herself an illegitimate child and the offspring of an elopement, was 
reared. * * * We believe the system to be radically wrong and practically dis- 
astrous. We believe it no more desirable to seal the eyes of the young to the fact 
of the existence of Adultery than to that of the existence of Murder." 

The passional books which I publish, including even Fourier on the Sexual Rela- 
tions, excite no morbid or unnatural curiosity ; for if, in Rousseau's Confessions, 
priests and celibats are exposed for unnatural conduct, it is always in such a way 
as to excite disgust therefor. Rousseau confesses that his discoveries in that direc- 
tion well nigh cured him of a most unnatural habit. They do not present such 
conduct as natural or common, as certain law-books, contrived by the most treacher- 
ous malice, or by consummate ignorance, and accessible to all curious youth, do ; 
nor, above all, as heaven-sanctioned, as the Bible leaves it plainly to be inferred 
that the conduct of "righteous" Lot's family was. 

Reformers should consider themselves as physicians to the social organism. And 
how are physicians to find out how to apply effectual remedies without studying 
the symptoms which their patients exhibit. 

These Passional Books, studied in connection with Plato, the ablest expounder 
of the ethical code which has not altered a particle to this day, show what a mis- 
erable quack nostrum moralism is. It was a perfect abortion from the beginning, 
as all will discover who read Ovid. They show the disastrous effects of attempt- 
ing to repress the natural, and by far the strongest and most imperious of human 
passions. Should this knowledge be smothered? Surely thoughtlessness, insanity 
or idiocy are the only pleas which can save those who contend that it should be, 
from being justly accused as the malicious emissaries of evil, treacherously dis- 
guised as the ministers of good. 

These books show that society must pursue a radically different course with the 
human passions. They show that the human desires cannot be conquered ; that 
attempting even to repress them, only causes them to raise the very devil. And 
what a horribly dull, monotonous, stupid and dreary world this would be, if the 
raid of moralists against gallantry should prove a complete success. If a scheme 
of monogamy could be invented, whereby all sexual intercourse out of it would 
be impossible, does any one suppose that such a scheme would not upset monogamy 
itself, in twenty-four hours' time, no matter what the consequences might be ? 
Adultery, fornication, and prostitution, are absolutely inseparable from mono- 
gamy ; they are as much its counterpart as the Devil is the complement of Chris- 
tianism. Moralists naively confess this ; they confess that the above " vices " are 
" necessary evils " — evils which they despair of curing. " Necessary evils ?'? 'Tis 
the most abominable lie ever uttered. 'Tis the most horrible blasphemy that by 
any possible form of words can be perpetrated. 

Is it not, then, matter of legitimate mirth, that the love passions circumvent, by 
any means, all the machinations of gloomy, unnatural, depraved, abhorrent, blas- 
phemous old fogyism ? that they show their ability to compel the doctors of the 
social organism to study till they find out how to unobstruct the course of natural 
law, and render its operation harmonious and good? 

Down, I say down, with those guardians of social corruption, hypocrisy, make- 
believe and cant. Away with that immaculate abortion — that most insidious 
treachery; that complete clog in the way of practical good — moralism. Man 
Wants the science and art of well-doing. Nothing short of this will avail. 



MY UNDERTAKING AND ITS AUSPICES. 



In 1854, Comte's Positive Philosophy and Feuerbach's Essence or 
Christianity fell under my observation. Many years before, I had read 
Fourier. His system, by itself, however, seemed to me to lack founda- 
tion. But Oomte furnished that foundation, and Feuerbach's demon- 
stration of the naturalness of " supernaturalism " precluded the possibil- 
ity of my coming to any other conclusion in the premises than that the 
religious idea was the index to, and nature's guaranty for, that Heaven 
on earth, of which Fourier was the prophet ; but which he, unfortu- 
nately, attempted to minutely describe at too great a distance, and thus 
fell into vagaries, with respect to particulars, which did much to 
obscure, and bring into contempt, his most profound and transcendentiy 
brilliant discoveries. 

I now determined to do all that lay in my power to forward that 
human perfection which was no longer a mere vague abstraction, but a 
mathematically calculable certainty. I soon placed before the American 
public, " The Positive Philosophy " of Auguste Oomte, " The Essence 
of Christianity," by Ludwig Feuerbach, and Fourier's " Social Destiny 
of Man:' 

It is but justice to Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. to say that before I 
commenced publishing liberal books, they imported an edition of The 
Positive Philosophy ; a work as much more powerful in the destruction 
of theology, than anything before written, as Sharp's rifles and artillery 
are more destructive than pop-guns and bows and arrows. 

Also, the Messrs. Harper & Brothers had the honor to precede me 
in the publication of " Howitt's History of Priestcraft." They also, as 
I do, publish that silencer of Moses — -that most powerful antidote to 
superstition, priestcraft, and old fogyism, " Vestiges of the Natural 
History of Creation." 

In fact, the largest publishers both in France, Germany, England, and 
the United States are finding it for their interest to publish, not only 
the most thorough of what are vulgarly called " infidel books," but even 
those books which recognize the rights of the human passions. To such 
an extent have passional rights come to be respected, that our most 
fashionable periodicals increased their circulation immensely by laying 
before their readers that unanswerable plea for the freedom of the affec- 
tions, purporting to be a letter from the truly Honorable Mrs. Mary 
Gurney. 

Do the Harpers, the Browns, the Littles, the Bohns, the Appletons, 
the Longmans, and the numerous other eminent publishers who are 
putting forth books which are sapping the very foundation of " our holy 
religion " in a " quiet way" as their Christian (?) apologists term it, 
sincerely believe what they profess to ? "When / professed the religion 
of Christianity (which was only whilst I remained ignorant of the fact 
that its truth had been understanding^ disputed), I was as sincere as I 
am now that I profess the religion of science ; and I most solemnly 
declare, that 1 would have suffered martyrdom in its most horrible 
form, sooner than I would have published Higgins's " Anacalypsis," 
Comte's " Positive Philosophy," Theodore Parker's works, Buckle's 
" History of Civilization in England," " Hume's Essays," the " Vestiges 
of Creation," Ho witt's " History of Priestcraft," Humboldt's "Letters to 
Von Ense," or hundreds of similar works now put forth in " a quiet 
way" by Christian (?) publishers. I most earnestly entreat the Christ- 
ian CO apologists, for the " quiet" method of "damning souls" and 



MY UNDERTAKING AND ITS AUSPICES. 

" demoralizing mankind," to reflect one moment on the character of the 
scheme which they are apologizing for. Do but this, and whatever may 
be your conclusions as to religion, you will respect, aye, love me ever 
afterward for this hint. 

The "Essence of Science" I published in 1859, and "The Religion 
of Science " in 1800. These give a view of the results which a practi- 
cal application of Comte, Feuerbach and Fourier must produce. They 
show conclusively, that nature is sufficient ; that she . spontaneously 
tends to perfection. And they demonstrate how man can so facilitate 
the process, that this great aim of nature may be attained with rapid 
and constantly increasing speed. Up to the present time, so great has 
been the demand for books, liberal not only with respect to opposition 
to theology and its governmental superstructure, but with respect to 
the long-crushed rights of the human passions, that my publications are 
now forty-four in number, of large size on the average, and many of 
them have, without recourse to auction sales or to the fraudulent and 
gambling credit system, reached their fifth edition. 

THE CLERGY ARE COMING ROUND. 
The clergy have been most encouraging purchasers of my books, as 
their preaching attests. Scarcely a discourse do they deliver in which 
they do not allude to some of them, or their contents, and in a manner 
exactly calculated to arouse curiosity respecting, and to stir up inquiry 
for them. The best points in their sermons are suggested by my publi- 
cations, as all know who have heard the one and read the other. The 
books which I publish, and similar ones, are now far more consulted by 
the higher clergy than is the Bible itself. Evidently, they long to be 
able to preach the religion of science, to expand the infant mind by 
means of it, instead of cramping it all but to death within the narrow 
compass of the religion of mystery. As, throughout nature, the good 
which is capable of arising from use, is in exact proportion to the evil 
which arises from abuse, what conceivable good may we not with cer- 
tainty expect from that now most abominable of abuses, the church ? 

THE RICH ARE WAKING UP. 
From the wealthy — from those who are heartily sick of the mockery 
of the gilding which little more than hides their misery from those who 
cannot afford whitewash for theirs — who see that the way which I am 
showing is the only one whereby wealth can be made valuable to any 
extent worth mentioning, have I also received most substantial support. 
But I must not mention names. We must "wait a little longer" (and 
I am encouraged to think not very long) before it will be popularly 
glorious to reward the toils and strengthen the hands of those who are 
laboring for the religion of science and its practical liberty and good- 
ness. 

THE LADIES ARE ON MY SIDE. 
Terrified by superstition, and brow-beaten and constrained by old 
fogyism, their silver-toned voices and sweet lips may falter out No, but 
their ravishing eyes say Yes. Their inmost heart-aspirations are for the 
triumph of a religious and social system which will develop them be- 
yond a blemish ; thus banishing their jealousies of each other, and ren- 
dering them very goddesses at whose feet it will be the highest bliss of 
man, commensurately developed, to adore. In their inmost hearts, they ; 
long for the time when love will be universally reciprocal, and when I 



MY UNDERTAKING AND ITS AUSPICES. 3 

lovers may, secure from harm and consequent disgrace, spontaneously 
luxuriate in each other's embraces. 

ALL THE WORLD IS WITH ME. 
Mankind express their fears that the intelligible perfection which I, 
&n apostle of the religion of science, preach, is " too good to be true.'''' 
They thus naively own that their very hearts' desire is for the triumph 
of the religion of science and for my success. Is not happiness the wish 
of all ? Can any one object to Heaven on earth ? Why believe in a Mil- 
lennium incomprehensibly producible, instead of in one demonstrably 
practicable ? 

THE OLD FOGIES 
even do not hate me ; they but delude themselves when they think 
so. Man's own ignorance is the only thing which he really hates. It 
is his ignorance alone which stands between him and perfect, and suffi- 
ciently lasting happiness ; ignorance with respect to the modifications 
and harmonies of which the substantial is precisely as susceptible as; that 
figment of the imagination, the "spiritual" is incoherently fancied to 
be. There is, there can be, no despotism, no evil, of which the kind of 
ignorance just named is not the sole cause. 

THE PEESS IS MY ALLY. 

The Religious Press, even, indirectly aids me ! 

THE DAILY "WORLD," 

a newspaper unctuous of holiness, in an elaborate general notice of all 
the books published by me, says that they are " without suppression," 
and that I have " wit enough to see that honesty is the best policy ;" 
which high eulogium contrasts ludicrously enough with its author's 
simultaneous feint of reproving me for my course as a publisher. 

Is it a rare specimen of " honesty," and therefore deserving of special 
praise, for an American publisher to put forth books of vital importance 
to mankind " without suppression ?" Have either of the editors of u The 
World" (one of whom I am told is a " Shakspeare Scholar ") ever been 
employed in mutilating European books for the edification of the Ame- 
rican public, a public which glories in nothing so much as in being its 
own best judge in all matters pertaining to religion, government and 
morals ? 

The censorship of the press is so odious, that it has to be exercised 
with great caution and due formality, even in imperial France. Do pub- 
lishers, in "free " America, dare to erect themselves into the most in- 
sufferable of tyrants? And am I the only publisher on whom this 
great Democratic Republic can safely rely ? " The World's " praise is 
either alarmingly significant, or altogether too complimentary. 1 am 
well assured that the views of " The World," sub rosd, both with respect 
to "the flesh" and " the devil," are "all right," that its whole body 
editorial inwardly prefers truth to falsehood; and that they would fain 
displace books which perpetuate mystery, despotism and old fugyism by 
those which advocate intelligibility ; which demonstrate how to achieve 
actual liberty ; which show how abominably the sexual relations have 
hitherto been fooled with, and how to remedy that and every other 
evil. But whoever dares not say so in a straightforward manner evi- 
dently has not yet, as " The World " says that I have, made the grand 
discovery that " honesty is the best policy." 



4 MY UNDERTAKING AND ITS AUSPICES. 

" The World" evidently does not discern the signs of the times. It 
libels the intelligence of the age, and underrates nineteenth century 
advancement in net daring to approve my course and recommend my 
publications, without feigning to be doing the contrary. 

Does " The World " expect or desire to be believed sincere by those 
whose opinions it values, and whose judgments it respects, when it 
affirms that the renowned "Decameron " of Boccaccio* and the world- 
famous " Confessions " of Jean Jacques Rousseau, are works of " slen- 
der literary merit ?" " The Confessions" says Lord Brougham, " is the 
greatest triumph ever won by diction." 

Does " The World " sincerely wish it to be understood that it judges 
Dry den, Ovid, and Johannes Secundus to be authors of " slender literary 
merit?" 

Uor shall " The World " excuse itself for advertising my publications 
" gratis" under the pretext of exposing me for attempting to bribe it to 
puff them. At the risk of appearing ungrateful, even, I assert, upon my 
honor, that I never, either " anonymously " or " personally," offered, or 
instigated to be offered, pay to any one for " puffing " or praising my 
books ; that I knew nothing whatever concerning a recent " Puff 
Gratis" both of myself and my books, until I read it in " The World." 
When I cannot do business except by such contemptible methods, I will 
retire ; or, at least, be consistent enough to publish only such books as are 
conceived in falsehood, and can best be palmed off through corruption. 

I am duly grateful to " The World " for its evident good intentions 
toward me as a publisher of u Books which are Books," and which are 
reliable, or "without suppression;" and, in return, I will give it a piece 
of information. Mankind, with the exception of the pitiably unintelli- 
gent, are now so sick of mystery, and its superincumbent political,, 
social, and moral inefficiency and abomination, that they simply endure 
these, together with the gammon which hypocritical cowards 'perpetrate 
in consequence thereof because they do not well see how to get rid of 
them ; they patiently suffer these, whilst waiting for the triumph of the 
intelligible and satisfactory religion of science, and its corresponding 
governmental or social art. If you have anything useful, or which, 
after duly considering, you deem useful and practical, to offer on reli- 
gious and social subjects, or, if you wish to direct attention to useful 
books in relation thereto, and guide the thinMng public to where such 
books are sold, let what you say indicate directly what you mean. All 
but downright fools will like you the better for it, and, what is of vastly 
more importance to yourself, or should be, you will thus justly secure 
your own respect and esteem. 

If we really have an inquisition in this country ; a power somehow 
lurking in our social structure — in our "model republic," which over- 
rides its own "free " " Constitution" vetoes Protestantism, and oelies 
all our boasts of liberty; a power before whom reformers, or their 
friends, have cause to quail, and falter and prevaricate, as " The 
World " seemingly does, measures cannot be too promptly taken to 
eliminate that abomination, to purge our democratic republic of what, 
to it, is immeasurably more humiliating and disgraceful than it can be 
m Spain, or in any country where civilization has not advanced to Pro- 
testantism and its correlative, the " elective franchise." 

* Such writers as Ben Jonson, Dryden, Moliere, and even Shakspeare, have, surreptitiously \ 
I am sorry to say r taken Boccaccio for their model ; and Koscoe, and even Milton, seem at a 
loss for terms strong enough to express their admiration of the genius which conceived " Th& 
Decameron*" 



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